Oh yes. In undergrad I had enough grasp of the Spanish language to write a 25 page academic paper about the impact of NAFTA on the Mexican economy, no problem. Spent some time in Mexico and found myself grasping for basic vocabulary. It’s a thing. And a lot of academic Spanish is full of cognates. Likewise when I worked in consumer credit counseling, it was the same vocab over and over. Sometimes you think you know a language but you only know a little slice of it. (That job was really useful for acclimating me to a wide range of accents, though.)
I have learned a fair amount through music, but you have to be careful not to over-generalize what could be region specific.
I hear Spaniards will give you hell if you don’t speak properly. I had a Spanish (Spanish) teacher who corrected other native speakers’ regional dialects. Ouch.
Yeah, how understandable people are when they’re making a specific effort to be understood is very different from how understandable they are when just talking casually with friends or family. When people (on both sides) are putting in the effort, you can get pretty far even when neither knows much of the language of the other.
Oh yeah, When working in the field for the Treasury, I acquired/brought back* a fair amount of Spanish- so that I could talk to business owners (who spoke some English) and they could answer my questions. But when they turned to an employee and rattled off some rapid fire Spanish, I could barely understand a word. So, when two sides are trying, things get better. Of course, it’s gone now.
My grandmother spoke a number of languages, including Castilian Spanish, so I learned some. The Mexican kids at school got a laugh out of what they called “lisping”, so i stopped trying.
I wonder how many people complaining about there not being English subtitles have Google Translate in their pocket and could have easily followed along with a few clicks on their smartphone.
My wife is Persian, born in Tehran. Her family fled the imminent Revolution when she was 10 and came to the US.
Over the subsequent years, she learned English, but maintained use of Farsi when speaking with family.
As a young adult, she got a job in a bank in Southern California.
One day, the bank manager calls her over. They’ve got an elderly Iranian gentlemen whose English is poor and they need to make sure he understands the terms of the loan he’s applying for. My wife cheerfully agrees, and spends the first few minutes of the conversation connecting with the guy, asking after his family, getting his history.
Then they get down to business, and my wife suddenly realizes that since her formal education in Farsi ended when she was 10 and everything afterward was casual interpersonal conversation, she has absolutely no idea how to say stuff like “compound interest.”
Some digging around reveals that, among Hispanophone dialects, the easiest to understand among non-local speakers is (wait for it) Mexican Spanish. I’ll be damned. Mexican Spanish is apparently the most “neutral” and globally understood, thanks to the preponderance of Mexican music and cinema and TV across the world. Sort of like English and the American dialect, one supposes. The most difficult to understand is (again wait for it) Puerto Rican and other Caribbean dialects. These are spoken faster, clip their consonants, swap consonant sounds, and use a lot of slang. No wonder @Pardel-Lux didn’t get it.
As for which colonial dialect of a European language is most difficult for other speakers to understand, I’m going to put my money on Quebecois French. My understanding is that the Canadians can get the general drift of what the French are trying to tell them, while the French can’t understand a word the Canadians are saying.
I spend a reasonable amount of time in Spain, and in my experience, locals are delighted that you’re trying. Bonus points for saying anything in Galego or Euskara in the right regions, and I assume the same is true of Catalan.
Largest-population Spanish-speaking country, so yes it has a large presence. Then remember to add the Mexican-American and that also leads to it having being used for much dubbing of American media on the past century (because, Hollywood’s in California).
I haven’t seen it mentioned in this thread, but may have missed it: During the show some (maybe most) lyrics were animated on the jumbotron. I could only see it from certain angles.
For a show of this size I think it’s very likely that the CC was prepared ahead of time. There is little value and a lot of risk to transcribe it live. I imagine the NFL learned from their wardrobe malfunction and would want to limit the ways an artist might go off-script.
I know it’s fun to dunk on those who are way too upset about it (and especially those who are performing anger). But I do think it is entirely reasonable to be disappointed that there was no translation.
Others have mentioned English-performing artists who are beloved by non-English speaking audiences in other countries. But I’ve also seen those performances on foreign TV and they tend to have baked-in subtitles. The lyrics are usually important to pop(ular) music, and it’s not just about hearing the beauty of the voice as an instrument.
And if you think that’s too much in the past, I would point out that I watch videos in other languages, and every last one of them has a way for me to see an English translation. For fancy stuff, that translation will be official. For other stuff, it may be AI. But I can understand it.
I think one of the coolest things about modern tech is how we can all learn to understand one another. I consider it part of being multicultural. Someone can leave a comment in a language I don’t speak, and I can reply to them in a language they don’t speak. It’s so fun.
So I really hope we don’t let MAGA turn “having subtitles for foreign languages” into a culture war thing. I want to see them more often, not less.
I know a woman who travelled all over Central and S. America in her 20s & 30s, and mastered dialects and slang from different regions. She served in the Peace Corps, worked as a Peace Corps recruiter among Hispanic populations in the US, and the worked as a missionary for her church, and they paid her to do it because of her language skills.
When she turned about 42, and wanted to slow down, she got a got at the Indiana State building being the person you got if you pressed 2 for espanol, because whatever dialect, accent, or slang people threw at her, she could handle it.
That was in the 1990s, though. Indianapolis became a sanctuary city, and needed more than one person handling the “press 2” calls. Also, many of the questions could be bots. This woman recorded lots of answers to simple questions, like the building’s hours.
She’s blind, and we happened to get put together as roommates when I went to Texas as a Deaf-Blind interpreter for the Nat’l Federation of the Blind convention. Word got around that she could communicate with the staff at the hotel, and people kept stopping by our room to ask her how to say something in Spanish. Or to get one of the fingerspelling/Braille cards I had to help people communicate with Deaf-Blind people.
We put a sign on our door that said “Interpreting Central.”
