The other night I had a bad dream where I was ripped off buying a box of matches, and when I got home I realized I ALREADY HAD A FULL BOX. So, you see, my subconscious has been dealing with some heavy stuff lately.
Anyway, I’ve recently acquired a ridiculous amount of tango music on my computer. I spent two days copying CDs from the library of a tango culture center called FECA, where I’m now interning, all the while rubbing my hands together excitedly and saying things like “Excellent, my plan is coming to fruition!”
Well, maybe not as movie-villainish as that. And, in between inserting and removing CDs from my disk drive, I got some translation done. UNESCO recently declared Tango to be “part of the world’s cultural heritage,” and it was my task to translate the application form sent to UNESCO on behalf of tango from English into Spanish.
That’s a reasonable task. The form was only available in English and French, for whatever beaurocratic reasons, and there ought to be a Spanish version when the music comes from a Spanish speaking region. The only problem is, the English version was obviously written by a native Spanish speaker:
- “These organisms depend of the city of Buenos Aires”
- “the elaboration process for the candidacy of the nomination of Tango”
and a couple other gems. It’s the false cognates that give it away — “organism” and “elaborate” don’t mean exactly the same things as organismo and elaborar. Plus there’s “depend of”, coming from depender de.
So, I’m offended by the inefficiency of the whole thing — the author should have written it in Spanish, and I should have translated it into English, right? This is why the UN doesn’t get anything done.
