Coworker tribute: To Cynthia Ramos: "A Dispatchtress' Sass"

To Cynthia Ramos:
"A Dispatchtress' Sass"

Regardless of how many and varied times
This interpreter chimes
-in with his whining,

For being sent to the seventh admission
In a row, while still famished for nutrition

Shining through with unending vim and vigor
You go beyond the droll and the "de rigueur"

And with great aplomb and grace
You tell me to shut my face,

And do what I'm told,
And, "you're smelly and old."

DNAZ Franco

How My Job Inspires Me 1

HOW MY JOB INSPIRES ME

This job has taught me how poorly I have loved my mother tongue. And how aloof I had behaved towards my adopted language. And that it is quite a miracle I have been able to communicate with anyone at all with such poor language skills. So I have been inspired to learn a better love for Spanish and English.

I love them well, now. It remains to be seen if I have learned to communicate better, though…

D

Coworker tributes: Ode to Belén

"Ode to Belén"

You might be overworked, listless, and sleepy
But still reply to me, though often weepy,

"Why me? Can't you find someone else to cover
your stupid night-shift?," and wish I were sober,

So that I'd be more appreciative
every time you say "I'll cover it".

D

LASer News 3

Idioms, phrasal verbs and slang.
Ah, how I hate them, idioms. Phrasal verbs, I loathe. And I positively despise colloquialisms (slang).
They are so very difficult to interpret!
Especially since they are phrases that are so common that the English speaker says them fairly quickly, leaving the interpreter in the dust with a big question mark hanging rather visibly on his face.
The main difficulty resides in the fact that most of idioms, phrasal verbs and slang are made up of regular words, but used figuratively. And, for the most part, these phrases are said in Spanish with completely different words. They are called "ready-made phrases" (or "frases hechas," in Spanish.)

Here are a few examples:

For idioms, how about, "it's six of one, and half a dozen of the other"? In Spanish, the idiom goes, "una de cal por una de arena." Yeah, go figure…

And don't get me started on phrasal verbs: "look up, look into, look down on, look around, look in, look ahead, look away, look after"… Need I keep going on?

Slang, I don't even want to tell you, but I will, anyway: "He's not all there" in Spanish would be, "está como ido."

As with many aspects of interpretation, these particular issues require the brute-force approach: Rote memorization of very long lists of vocabulary, and many years of practice.

Go ahead. Good luck.

DNAZ Franco

Traducción literaria

Yo soy muy afecto a escuchar canciones antiguas y a veces medio esotéricas y eclécticas. He decidido que algunas de ellas podrían traducirse al español como relatos cortos, capturando de esa manera el tono que el autor quiso impartirles originalmente.
Por lo general, las traducciones de letras de canciones nunca vienen al caso porque las rimas se pierden y el contexto no encaja en el idioma traducido.

A ver qué sale… Los relatos que están basados en canciones aparecen con la etiqueta "Traducción literaria".

D