Spanish Translation Blog: Spanish Translation US October, 2008 - Spanish Translation Blog: Spanish Translation US
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Archive for: October, 2008

Bilingual and Bicultural

Many people think that anyone who speaks a second language would make a good translator. It’s not enough however, for the translator to just be bilingual. He or she must be “bicultural” as well. Understanding their “second language’s” culture is a must for translators. A professor from Un

Spanish Words in English

With so much often said about the infiltration of English into the Spanish language, one often forgets that borrowed words and loan words are a two-way street. United States English has its share of linguistic contributions from Spanish, words that come from Mexico, Cuba, Spain and beyond. The two most common classification

A Story

October 24, 2008 4 Comments »

“Translations” The same thing always happened to him. When someone translated one of his poems into a foreign language (at least, a foreign language that he knew), his own verses sounded better than in the original. This is why it came as no surprise that he found the French version of his poem “Time and [

The Future of Spanish in the U.S.

The general consensus about Spanish in the U.S. is that its use, in terms of the number of speakers and general “visibility” (mainstream media, advertising, etc.), is growing exponentially. And with record numbers of Spanish-speaking immigrants coming from South and Central America, it looks like this will conti

The Translation of the Most Widely Read Book in the World

October 17, 2008 3 Comments »

Just two weeks after Translator’s Day, which is celebrated on the anniversary of Saint Jerome’s death as a tribute to him having been the first to translate the Bible into Latin, an agreement was reached at the Vatican in favor of further translation and distribution of the most widely book in history.  Accordi

Translators and the Presidential Election

October 14, 2008 5 Comments »

The United States has long prided itself on being a “melting pot” of different cultures and backgrounds and this becomes especially apparent amidst talk of the different voter demographics and the pledges made to different ethnic groups. Apart from the Spanish translations that I mentioned before on McCain and O

A Little Bit of History: The First Latin-American Interpreter

October 10, 2008 2 Comments »

She is known by many names: Malinalli, Malintzin(Spanish transliterations of her original name– the tzin suffix was added to indicate hierarchy and nobility), “Doña Marina,” or most commonly, La Malinche. Malineli Tenepatl (c.1502 – c.1529), a Mexican girl born into the upper class, was presented to

How to Select a Good Translation Agency

Cheap and fast are the first two words that go through most people’s minds when they start looking for a translation agency. But when they read over the first translation that they had done based solely on those two criteria, they’ll probably rethink the whole idea and realize that “quality” was actu

The Painstaking Task of Rereading your Translation

Personally, one of the things about translating that gets under my skin is having to check over it once I’m done. I hate it. But after a few jobs where I wanted to bang my head against the wall because I hadn’t gone back over it and spotted my stupid mistake (but of course someone […]