New member...spanish translation help

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donkeygoatee
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New member...spanish translation help

Postby donkeygoatee » Tue Jun 20, 2017 3:28 pm

Hi...new member here. I'm looking for some advice/feedback about learning from translation. I'm learning Spanish using the Pimsleur course and I want to use bilingual text to complement it. I haven't found much on the internet, but I did find this site which I thought looked useful:

http://www.lonweb.org/daisy/ds-spanish-lorna.htm

But when I started comparing the two versions, I was a bit discouraged. The reason is that even though I'm a beginner, it looks to me like it's not a very good translation. For example:

Daisy no era aún muy conocida pero de vez en cuando recibía llamadas de personas que habían leído su anuncio en un periódico local.

Daisy wasn't very well known yet but occasionally people telephoned her from the advertisement she had put in the local newspaper.


Now, it looks to me like it says she received calls from people who had read her ad in a local newspaper. None of the things I've bolder are present in their English translation. Of course I know that doesn't change the gist of it, but from the point of view of trying to learn the language, it's very confusing. I know an accurate translation can't be word-for-word most of the time, but why change it more than necessary? They seem to have changed the verbs used, the pronoun (from her ad to the ad) etc. All things that you generally can't ignore when reading, listening or speaking. My goal is to translate the text into English, and then back into Spanish (on my own) and use the original texts to check how well I'm doing at each stage. So need it to be precise. If I had translated it myself with the help of a dictionary, I would never have come up with the text they provided.

Have I mistranslated it, or am I missing something?

The reason it's such a problem is that sometimes it makes me question other phrases they have that might need to be changed for all know, such as

"Hola, ¿puedo hacer algo por ustéd?"

""Hello, can I help you?"


...now I have trouble telling if I would be changing the meaning with "can I do anything for you?", since this is a different meaning in English, but it might not be in Spanish.

So, should I stop second guessing the provided translations? Or have I picked a bad piece of text to work with?

Thanks for reading my long winded first post!
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iguanamon
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Re: New member...spanish translation help

Postby iguanamon » Tue Jun 20, 2017 6:34 pm

First, welcome to the forum, donkeygoatee. You managed to reach intermediate in Irish. So, you know that a language isn't a cipher code where you plug and chug words. I've seen some of the Daisy story translations because I used some of them when I was learning Haitian Creole and they had similar issues to what you describe. Still, the meaning comes through.
donkeygoatee wrote: I'm learning Spanish using the Pimsleur course and I want to use bilingual text to complement it.

You shouldn't be using Pimsleur as your main course. Try to add in a traditional book/cd course like Assimil, Teach Yourself or a free course. For a big language like Spanish, there are many, many, options available. I have used Pimsleur and it works well at what it does but I would never use it as my main course. It works best in combination with a more thorough textbook and cd course.

Some translations are better than others. Have a look at my post Using GlobalVoices.org to make simple parallel texts which may give you some ideas. I find the Global voices articles to be faithful (though not exact word for word) translations. For Spanish you should also have a look at Alba Learning for some pre-made parallel texts of public domain books. No parallel text is going to be perfect with exact translations of every word. Sometimes a phrase said one way in English will be said differently in TL because it sounds more natural that way to convey the same information.

When first learning, it's probably a good idea to get most of your learning from your textbook and use parallel texts to supplement that learning. There are many ways to say "How can I help you?" in both Spanish and English. "What can I do for you?"; "Do you need something"; "Is there something I can do for you?"; "Are you looking for something?"; "May I assist you"; "¿Cómo pueda ayudarle?"; "Cómo puedo servirle?"; even "A sus órdenes" can convey that information. The English phrase "Raining cats and dogs" is usually translated as "Lloviendo a cántaros" in Spanish, which means "Raining at (the rate of) pitchers" or "raining in abundance" but it is the same concept as the English "raining cats and dogs" even though the words "cats/gatos and/y dogs/perros" are not present in the Spanish phrase. You can do a "hyperliteral" translation of the TL alongside a more free translation to help show yourself how the language works.
Hans Christian Andersen- from Alba Learning wrote:Érase una vez un príncipe que quería casarse con una princesa, pero tenía que ser una verdadera princesa. Viajó por todo el mundo buscando una, pero no pudo encontrar en ningún sitio lo que buscaba.
My hyperliteral translation: There was one time a prince that wanted to marry himself with a princess, but she had that to be a true princess. He traveled through all the world searching (seeking) one, but he no could find in no one place that what he searched for(sought).
Literary translation: Once upon a time there was a prince who wanted to marry a princess, but she would have to be a real princess. He traveled all over the world to find one, but nowhere could he get what he wanted. source

So as you see, it's not an exact translation. It wouldn't sound right in English if it were. "Buscar" can be translated as "to look for/to seek". Here the translator chooses to say nowhere could he get what he wanted instead of "sought". Obviously "buscar" isn't usually translated as "wanted" which is usually the verb "querer". In this sense "nowhere could he get what he wanted" conveys the sense of looking for something and not being able to find what he was looking for (wanted). Translation is inexact and always a compromise. Making a hyperliteral translation can help serve as a bridge to seeing how to relate words to concepts. As you learn more basic Spanish, this will become clearer to you. I wish I could be of more help.
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donkeygoatee
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Re: New member...spanish translation help

Postby donkeygoatee » Tue Jun 20, 2017 7:21 pm

Thanks for the detailed reply!

I get what you're saying about being hyperliteral. I wasn't trying to suggest that they should have gone that far - I just thought it could be a lot more literal while still sounding perfectly natural in English, i.e. "she got calls from people who had read her ad" tells me both what's being said and how it's being said, and is a lot more useful than "people called her from the ad" (which, the more I think about it, doesn't even really make sense in English). I suppose I assumed that the English version of the text was intended to help understand the Spanish, rather than to be a work of literature in it's own right. I probably just assumed that because that is what I am looking for :)

I'll definitely take a look at some of the other material you mentioned though, thanks!
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donkeygoatee
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Re: New member...spanish translation help

Postby donkeygoatee » Wed Jun 21, 2017 12:43 am

I've been looking a Globalvoices.org...but I can't find anything in more than one language. If I switch languages, it changes to a completely different set of articles. I must be missing something obvious lol...any tips?
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smallwhite
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Re: New member...spanish translation help

Postby smallwhite » Wed Jun 21, 2017 3:07 am

You can write to lonweb and help them help learners better.
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iguanamon
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Re: New member...spanish translation help

Postby iguanamon » Wed Jun 21, 2017 11:27 am

donkeygoatee wrote:I've been looking a Globalvoices.org...but I can't find anything in more than one language. If I switch languages, it changes to a completely different set of articles. I must be missing something obvious lol...any tips?

Yes, the menu at top goes to the specific language site for Global Voices and the articles are different. That's why you have to find a specific interesting article you may want to read, click on it in either English or Spanish and look for its translation to the other language.

When you go to the Global Voices site in English, click on an interesting article you'd like to read. It will open. Then look to the upper right of the page. You'll see "Read this post in Malagasy, Español, Português, English". Right click on the article in Spanish and open it in a new tab. Follow my instructions in the link I provided above to make your own parallel text by copying and pasting the text from both articles and aligning the text to match. Once you will have done a few of these the process is quite simple. The text is easier to copy from the "print" icon on the upper left side. Use the English site to find articles you'll want to read and then use the "read this post in x language" for the same article in your TL. Or look in your TL, Spanish, for the article you may find interesting and look to the upper right for "Lea este post en English". All the translations are done by native-speakers. Newer articles take time to translate and may not have translations up yet, so check for older articles. Or, you can buy ready-made parallel (bilingual) texts from Amazon and Abe Books.

Edit: To start you off, here's a recent article originally written in Spanish Crónicas de la ciudadana preocupada: Escenas para (intentar ) comprender a Venezuela and the same article translated into English by a human Chronicles of a Concerned Venezuelan: Scenes to Help You (Try to) Understand Venezuela
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donkeygoatee
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Re: New member...spanish translation help

Postby donkeygoatee » Wed Jun 21, 2017 1:48 pm

Got it thanks!
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