Impostora

Trying to master a foreign language

Archive for the category “Spanish”

21 Aug 2012

Barcelona, episode 2

20-22 de julio: días de descanso

Nada: es lo que me toca hacer. Primero, dormir. Dormir hasta la nueve y media de la mañana. Dormir la siesta. Segundo: pasar tiempo leyendo en las terrazas. Hay dos tipos de ciudades: las con terrazas y las sin terrazas. Para mi, la terraza es una de las características de la civilización. Siempre me gustaron más Paris, Buenos Aires y Barcelona, que Londres, Fráncfort y Los Angeles.

¿Qué leo en las terrazas? Pues, los periódicos: El País, pero también el periódico catalán, La Vanguardia, que sale no solo en Catalan, sino también en Castellano. Sobre todo hablan de la crisis: reformas económicas, planes de ajuste, prima de riesgo, recortes…lo difícil que es vivir aquí en estos días. Y, a pesar de todo, la gente sigue siendo amable y acogedora.

La playa no ha cambiado. No se puede ir a Barcelona sin pasar varias horas en la playa. Hace calor, pero no tanto como pensaba que hiciera. Paso tiempo paseando en los parques, y tomo por primera vez el teleférico de Montjuic.

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19 Aug 2012
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Training in Barcelona

The following entries were written in Barcelona, while I was doing an AIIC Spanish language and culture course. I am uploading them only now, after the fact, because in Barcelona my access to internet, at times when I could write, was patchy at best. Truth be told, I had very little time to write at all, what with the lectures, the visits and time spent with friends both old and new. I arrived in the city on July 20. The plan was to have a couple of days to kick back before any serious work got under way. The course itself took place from July 23-28.

The entries are in Spanish–my first attempt at activation. Please feel free to comment, and to correct any mistakes.

20 de julio
Rumbo a Barcelona
Llego al aeropuerto sin ningún problema. Es un trayecto que conozco muy bien. En el tren (RER B), nunca hay sitio para las maletas, que los viajeros dejan donde pueden, aunque la linea comunica la Paris con el aeropuerto Roissy Chasrles de Gaulle. Siempre hay músicos que tocan instrumentos con mas o menos éxito. Cruzamos sin parar los suburbios del norte de Paris, un trayecto que dura apenas cuarenta minutos.

El vuelo no está lleno–quizás la consecuencia de la crisis. Una hora y media mas tarde, estoy en Barcelona. El aerobús me traslada del aeropuerto hasta la Plaza de Cataluña para solamente 5,65 euros. Empieza muy bien este viaje.

Posted in Interpretation and translation, Spanish, Travel and tagged , ,
21 Feb 2012
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Conferencias en línea

Now that I have started working from Spanish in the booth, I feel I need to practice almost daily. It’s a matter of building up my confidence. To practice, I need material. Radio and television programs are helpful, but more for general knowledge than for simultaneous interpretation practice. In the media, the pace and register are geared for entertainment rather than communication.

Instead, I look for online lectures. Whereas YouTube is a valuable source, I find I waste a lot of time wading through irrelevant material before I find something useful. I need something more targeted. For now, the ITunesU app serves my purpose and gives me access to free online lectures from universities the world over, including Spanish and Latin American Universities.

I start with the lectures offered by Universidad de Navarra. Some are quite short (10-15 minutes), other are fifty-minute classes. the quality of the recordings is uneven, but generally it’s good enough. I write down new terms. An interview on new technologies in education yields a new expression “se cuenta con”, as in “se cuenta con los educadores que nos consultan sobre algún tipo de cuestión…”. From a lecture on the physical properties of materials, I learn the term grieta, cracks (or fissuresin French). In a lecture to student teachers, a Peruvian professor discusses what it means to be a good teacher, and I get an initial impression of what educated Peruvians sound like.

I practice shadowing, i.e. repeating what the speaker says simultaneously, taping myself and doing spot checks of the recording. I practice memorisation. I let the speaker talk for two or three minutes, pause the recording and do a summary in Spanish. I tape myself and check. I practice simultaneous, into French or English. It becomes easier every day.

Posted in Interpretation and translation, Languages, Spanish
16 Feb 2012
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Cine: Un Cuento Chino

http://cambialacinta.blogspot.com/2011/07/un-cuento-chino-2011.html

Paris is a great place to live if you like foreign movies. And by foreign, I don’t mean American blockbusters (which, in France, are foreign films too). What I mean is it’s a great place to live if you like movies from everywhere else in the world. The latest Argentinian comedy-drama, Un cuento chino, is playing everywhere, in Spanish, with French subtitles.

Un cuento chino (released in France as El Chino) is the opposite of a blockbuster. The only action is in the opening scene, which features a cow falling from the sky. The premise is as follows: reclusive, and misanthropic hardware store owner gets saddled with a young Chinese immigrant who is lost and does not speak a word of Spanish. The helpless young man eventually forces him out of his shell and makes him confront the traumatic events of his youth, also those of the country as a whole.

http://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm-197304/photos/detail/?cmediafile=19846107

Posted in Languages, Music, books, art and culture, Spanish
15 Feb 2012
2 Comments

Taking the leap: interpreting from Spanish

I’m now back from Argentina and officially working from Spanish. According to standard conference interpretation terminology, Spanish for me is a C language, i.e. a language, which, for professional purposes, is passive, a language you work from, not into. I have never had a C language before. My other two languages (English and French) are both active, both A (i.e. native) languages.

The upshot is that for the first time in my life, I do not have full intuitive command of the message. because I have to devote more energy to listening, I have less energy to devote to analysing and re-expressing the message. Like a colleague who discussed her experience of adding Swedish C in 2002 (see Déjean Le Féal, Karla. 2002. “La “théorie du sens” au banc d’essai.” in Israël), I find myself struggling to avoid word-for-word translations. From Spanish, I also retain less information in short-term memory.

For the time being, I have nothing but questions. How can I gear meeting preparation to the problems of working from C? What is the link between activation and understanding, and what language enhancement activities should get priority? Where can I find data on C language acquisition and development?

A lot of work in store!….

Posted in Interpretation and translation, Languages, Spanish and tagged , ,
13 Jan 2012

Vos o tú

Like French and English, Spanish is a global language, with over 400 million native speakers in 70 different countries (my stats are courtesy of wikipedia). Spanish therefore comes in many different. flavors.

Here, in Argentina, where I am traveling to attend a conference, people use ‘vos’ instead of ‘tú’ as the second person singular pronoun.

This is not what I learned as a student of Spanish, first, briefly, in highschool, and later, much more extensively, in France, as an adult. I learned Spanish mainly from Spaniards. Spaniards don’t necessarily agree among themselves as to what constitutes proper Spanish. Speakers from Asturias don’t sound anything like speakers from, say Estremadura or Andalucia. But Spaniards all agree that the second person singular pronoun is ‘tú’. No one had ever bothered to tell me about ‘vos’.

Yet ‘vos’ is no minor local quirk. It is used in what is refered to as Rioplatense Spanish, in other words, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, and to a lesser extent in many other countries, ranging from Chile to Central America to bits of Colombia and Venezuela. That’s a lot of people. more than the total population of Spain.

To at least to try to use ‘vos’ instead of ‘tú’, while I’m here, is, of course, irresistible–at the risk of sounding even more confused than I aleady am. So what if I get it wrong? I am a foreigner–a ‘forastera’. I’m allowed to be confused. So in I dive, asking the taxi driver “tenés el cambio?” instead of ‘tienes’ (more later on the topic of asking for change in this country–that’s an entry all to itself).

More on vos or voseo:

http://spanish.about.com/od/pronouns/a/vos_argentina.htm

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12 Jan 2012

Forastera

In a foreign language, social awkwardness is multiplied one hundred fold. If you’re slightly shy and a bit awkward in your own language, then in the new language it’s the same, only worse. The only difference is you have no hope of truly connecting, so you don’t even try. Instead of a full-fledged personality, you settle for a persona. You’re “the foreigner”.

Being the foreigner is not a bad deal. Au contraire, It makes you special. If you avoid other expats, If you wait patiently, inevitably someone will adopt you, take you home, and show you off to their friends.

You will meet interesting people. You won’t “get” them. You can never know what they know, or understand their experience, but, as your communication skills improve, you can get a glimpse–more than a glimpse–of a different reality. For a moment, you forget yourself, and when you come back to yourself, you find that you have grown.

Posted in Languages, Spanish | Leave a comment
01 Jan 2012
2 Comments

Impostora

This blog is about my life in Spanish. I am not a native Spanish speaker. Spanish is a language I learned late in life, after my mother died. That was 10 years ago. She was 62–far too young. I was 38, and I suddenly realized that I was not going to live forever, and that whatever I wanted to do, I had better do now. There were two things I had always wanted to do: learn Spanish and play the cello.

This blog is mainly about Spanish, which I will never speak as well as I speak my native languages, French and English. In Spanish, I will always be something of an impostor. I will never really understand it or truly know it from the inside. It will never trip off my tongue effortlessly.

Learning a language is a hopeless, futile quest, but all the better. As Cyrano de Bergerac (an impostor himself) would have it, “c’est bien plus beau lorsque c’est inutile.” I know, I know, that’s French. A reference to Quijote would undoubtedly be more appropriate. Desafortunadamente (my favorite word in Spanish–impossible not to get it wrong), I have yet to read that great classic: another item on my seemingly endless list of “Things To Do in Spanish”.

In the process of discussing Spanish, I may also touch on other topics that matter to me: work, music (I did learn the cello, by the way), books, relationships, exercise, cooking, children, friends, family–what are blogs for if not to share all sorts of personal details with the universe–is someone out there?

Dear Reader, should you turn out to exist, your input and comments are highly valued and eagerly awaited.

Posted in Languages, Spanish

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