Fonaments de la traducció

Pràctica avaluable 2

Lliurament: 4 novembre

1) Llegeix el text que trobaràs en els fulls següents i fes la traducció del fragment
marcat en fosforescent de dues maneres: amb els teus mitjans i amb un
traductor automàtic.

2) Tradueix-lo al català o al castellà fent ús d’algun traductor automàtic, per

exemple el traductor de Google: https://translate.google.cat/

També pots provar-ho amb algun altre traductor:

OPENTRAD – http://www.opentrad.com//index.php?idioma=ca

O iTRANSLAT4.EU - Translate (itranslate.com)

Fixa’t que has de seleccionar el parell de llengües i la direcció adequades:

anglès-català (o castellà).

3) Tradueix-lo al català o al castellà amb els teus propis mitjans (pots inspirar-te
en la versió automàtica o no) .

4) Selecciona DOS elements (una paraula, una expressió, etc.) que mostrin les
limitacions de la traducció automàtica i fes-ne un comentari descriptiu i
explicatiu de cadascun. Un dels dos elements triats ha de fer referència,
necessàriament, al concepte d’unitat de traducció*: Amb quina unitat de
traducció està operant aquest traductor automàtic? Mostra-ho amb un exemple.

L’exercici lliurat ha de contenir aquests tres elements:

1. la teva traducció
2. la traducció automàtica
3. el comentari dels dos elements triats

Criteris d’avaluació

Es valoren aquests aspectes:

 La teva traducció 6 punts
 Comentari dels dos elements 4 punts
2 punts per cada element, distribuïts així:
 Bona descripció de l’element 1 punt
 Explicació i anàlisi satisfactòries 1 punt

* Per a la noció d’unitat de traducció, cf. Diapositiva 20, ppt 4proces i Hurtado Albir (p.
224 i ss.)

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Text anglès

‘Bicing’, ‘Filín’ and ‘’Footing’: On the Nomadism of Words

Fred Halliday
In a brilliant observation some years ago, the writer Juan Goytisolo criticised the idea
that human beings have ‘roots’. ‘Humans are not trees’, he wrote. ‘They do not have
roots, they have legs, they walk’ (original ‘El hombre no es un arból: carece de raíces,
tiene pies, camina’ El Pais 24 septiembre 2004). Striking as this observation is, it may
be possible to make the same observation about another kind of entity that is almost
universally thought to have roots, namely words.
To know the origin of a word is indeed relevant to understanding a vocabulary
and the history of a language. Indeed one of the delights of studying any language is to
see how words have developed over the years. But there is often an illegitimate slippage
here, what may be termed ‘etymological determinism’, whereby words are said to have
one ‘true, ‘original’, ‘authentic’ or whatever meaning and subsequent usages are to be
criticised if they depart too much from this origin, or root. Writers of nationalist
persuasion, and religious authorities using sacred texts, are particularly fond of this
claim. The Greek word etimos, from which ‘etymology’ derives, itself means ‘real’ or
‘genuine’.
Yet a moment’s study of any modern language will show that etymological
determinism, in the sense of a claim of semantic roots and fixedness, is unsustainable.
No-one who talks about the ‘Canary islands’ thinks of their original meaning, ‘the
Islands of the Dog’, from Latin canis. No political protester who engages in a ‘boycott’ is
expected to think of the original object of such treatment, the English landlord in
nineteenth century Ireland, Capt. Boycott. The supporters of ETA who throw ‘Molotov
Cocktails’ do not know, or care, about Stalin’s long’ serving foreign minister.
This practice, of the voyaging, meandering and migrating of words, is evident to
anyone who, knowing English, reads a Spanish newspaper today, or to anyone who,
knowing Spanish, reads a text in English. At first sight, the Spanish press is indeed full
of English words, ones that correspond more or less to their original English meaning,
and are thus correctly classified as ‘loan words’. Some came into Spanish at the end of
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: these would include mitín, líder, fútbol,
poquér, rosbíf.. Many more, in the fields of technology, sport, drug addiction, music,
youth culture and so on have entered more recently.
However, what soon strikes the English-language reader of El Pais or La
Vanguardia is how many of these supposedly ‘loan’ words have acquired new,
different, meanings when deployed into Spanish. This is not a question of what are
termed ‘false friends’, words with a common, often Latin, origin that mean different
things, such as ‘profesor’ or ‘presidente’, which in English are teacher and prime
minister, Examples of nomadic words would include standing, feeling/filín, footing,
pudin the English translation of which would be ‘status’, ‘affection’, ‘jogging’ ‘baked
dessert’. Some supposedly English words do not exist in English at all: bicing, birding,
bulling – the correct form of these being ‘bicycling’, ‘bird-watching’, ´bullying’.
‘Hallucinated’ in English means to be suffering from illusions or dreams, not as with
Spanish alucinado ‘fascinated’, ‘I flipped’ means I became very angry, not as in Spanish
flipear, to be pleased by something. English ‘crack’ is either a word for a narcotic, or a
split (grieta) as in a wall or other surface, the equivalent of Spanish ‘crack’, as with
Ronaldinho, being a star.
In recent decades, as a result of British tourism in Spain and, at the same time,
of Mexican and Latino influence in the USA, many Spanish words have come into
English: ‘paella’, ‘tapas’, ‘amigo’, ‘enchilada’, ‘machismo’, ‘sangría’ to name but some.
However, the influence of Spanish on English goes back much further, to the sixteenth
century, and the encounter of the English and Spanish navies in European and

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Caribbean waters: thus by 1700 English had ‘armada’, ‘junta’, ‘mosquito’, ‘armadillo’,
‘sherry’ (from Jeréz). By some quaint transference of respect, the Spanish ‘Don’ as a
title for a man came to be used, in the 1660s, for teachers at the Universities of Oxford
and Cambridge, this leading to the adjective donnish. Soon afterwards came
‘sombrero’, ‘patio’, ‘extravaganza’, ‘bonanza’, ‘siesta’,‘cork’ (from corcho). Many English
words for food originated in Spanish or were Arabic, later American, words that came
to English via the Iberian Peninsula: tea, coffee, orange, candy from Arabic, chocolate,
chili, tomato, potato, guacamole from the Americas.
Many of these are, in the proper sense, ‘loan’ words, more or less corresponding
in English to the Spanish usage. Again, however, much nomadism and redeployment
can be noted. Some times English seeks to give a spurious Hispanic tone to borrowed
words thereby yielding words that do not exist in Spanish – thus ‘aguacate’ becomes
avocado, ‘torero’ and ‘matador’ are fused into the hybrid toreador, and a spiralling
storm is a tornado. What is even more widespreading is, however, the tendency to give
these Spanish words meanings that are significantly different from what they mean in
their language of origin: thus in English patio is any paved area next to or outside a
building, not, as in Spanish, an enclosed courtyard, guerrilla is a person who fights a
‘little war’, equivalent to Spanish guerrillero, not the war itself; aficionado is a person
with an educated interest in something; junta is an illegitimate military regime; macho
is a generally derogative word, quite distinct from the more neutral masculine;
cafeteria is a self-service eating facility attached to a place of work.
The implications of this nomadism are parallel to those which Juan Goytisolo
sought to indicate with his observation on human beings and roots: much as there are
people who seek to fix, eternally define and insulate languages and vocabulary, the very
process of linguistic change, the interaction, over centuries and long preceding the
globalisation of today, of cultures and peoples and the sheer inventiveness of human
speech all prevent this paralysis from occurring. It is time, with words, as with people,
to recognise that they do indeed have points of origin, and departure, but that much of
their later life leads them to find homes, and new meanings, in other lands.
Ends