I’ve seen quite a bit of daft translation recently. My reason for posting it is not to have a laugh at how bad foreigners are at speaking English. That would be a bit rich when English-speakers are generally among the worst or laziest at learning foreign languages. Fair enough if it gives people a laugh but the point of this post is to show what can happen when you translate literally using translation tools or when you don’t employ an experienced native English-speaking translator.

When deciding to save a few quid on a decent translator, businesses should be aware that it might result in their enterprise being ridiculed and to possible subsequent lost trade as it makes them look unprofessional.

This English menu comes from a tapas bar near the Puerta del Sol in the heart of Madrid:

Shark in Seasoning
Fried Chopitos
Friedsquids
Fritter of Fish Changed
Shrimps to the Chopped Garlic
Small Squids to the Plate
Tail of Bull
Sausages to the Cider
Smoke Ham to the Galician
Iberian Ham
Cured Manchego Cheese

Well they got two or three right anyway.

"The rich countries can take measures. In the Netherlands, they create floating houses to combat floods. In Vietnam, they just teach people to swim."

-Ruhal Ahmed, A UN Development Officer

It’s the Spanish general election tomorrow. The ruling party, PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) was slightly ahead in the polls last week. Opinion polls cannot be published in the six days before the election in case they influence the result. But if PSOE is to stay in power they may need to form a coalition with some of the Catalan and/or Basque nationalist parties.

Last time around the general election took place in the wake of the March 11 bombing in Madrid. It is thought to have had a major bearing on the result. This time, a former socialist councillor was shot dead two days before the election. Who knows how this could affect tomorrow’s result.

This week, it has been interesting for me to talk to people at my work in an attempt to try to gauge public opinion. I’ve been struck by the fact that a few people who see themselves as either left-leaning or certainly not peperos (followers of the opposition Partido Popular), think that the Spanish immigration laws need to be severely tightened up and that immigrants are at the heart of many of the problems in modern Spanish society.

In my view, the PP has been playing if not the race card, then certainly the immigrant card. If people who do not see themselves as traditional PP supporters have been won over by this view, then I’d say Mariano Rajoy’s party has a good chance of attracting many floating voters in a number of areas. For that reason, I would not write off the PP’s chances of achieving a largely unexpected victory.

In recent times, Spain has become a country people want to come to live and work in, rather than a European backwater to escape from. Many Spaniards are struggling to come to terms with the increasing number of immigrants. Others are exploiting it for political gain. Rajoy likes to use the word “avalanche” to describe the recent wave of immigration that Spain and many other EU countries have experienced and encouraged. To hear some people talk (Rajoy among them), you’d think crime was virtually non-existent in Spain until all the immigrants arrived.

One argument I hear often is that there’s not much point in learning languages like Galician or Catalan and that you’d be better off learning say, Chinese. In the great scheme of things that might be true enough. But where the argument falls down is when it is put forward by people who live in Galicia or Catalonia, people who may well come into contact with the said regional languages on a daily basis.

It may be useful to learn a language like Chinese these days, if for instance, you intend to travel to China or encounter Chinese clients in your work. But if not, then what is it about learning Chinese that makes it of more practical use?

I merely use Chinese as an example. The same could be said of many other international languages that have a far higher number of speakers than Catalan or Galician does.

The crux of the matter might be, as a student of mine in A Coruña who had no interest in learning Galician observed, “many people in Spain do not think of regional languages as proper ones”.

There are many reasons for this outlook. It is too deep a subject for me to go into here, but chief among them is probably the fact that neither is the principal language of the state.

It’s kind of funny though, when they are co-official languages in the autonomous communities of Galicia and Catalonia. Co-official, yet somehow inferior. And in the case of Catalan, it is more widespread than many people are aware of, being the official language of Andorra, and also spoken in a number of Mediterranean islands (including Sardinia), as well as parts of southern France.

The most vistited monuments and museums in Spain in 2007 were:

1. Alhambra, Granada, Moorish fortress comes out tops with over three million visitors.
2. Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Gaudi's ongoing architectural experiment.
3. Prado,Madrid, museum hosting many classic art treasures.
4. Reina Sofia, Madrid, modern art museum in the Spanish capital.
5. Dali Museums, various museums in Catalonia associated with the nutty artist.
6. Guggenheim, Bilbao, (pictured).
7. Thyssen, Madrid, yet another fine art museum in the capital.
8. Macba, Barcelona, Catalonia's principal modern art museum.
9. Picasso Museum, Malaga, the city where the celebrated artist was born.