I bolded the part of a sentence I wish to ask about. Google translates it as “Cala a captivating and entertaining journalist, who asks what you want to know.” I assumed Google made a mistake, but my (admittedly primitive) grasp of Spanish agrees with the translation.
So my question is: Did CNN en Español make a mistake? Did Google? Or is it just acceptable to drop the linking verb in standard Spanish grammar?
The Spanish text you pasted is missing the copula word “es” (“is”). Hence, Google couldn’t figure out what was going on, and seems to have tried to treat the surname “Cala” as if it were the imperative form of some unknown verb.
It would also be perfectly correct with the verb ellided but another comma:
Cala, un periodista cautivador y entretenido, quien pregunta lo que te interesa saber.
I would use “que” instead of “quien”, but I’ve seen quien used that way before in Mexican and Central American newspapers; I’m not sure how much is it a regionalism and how much to avoid having two “ques” that close to each other. Spanish is a lot less tolerant of repetition than English, in general.
If you add the verb, then the secomd comma (the only one in the original) needs to be taken out.
Another interpretation would be that the original contains wordplay. I’m going out on a bit of a limb here, but IIRC, some people use “calar” with a meaning of “look, watch” (at least one of my Costa Rican clients did it all the time), so the sentence would have two meanings: what Google did, and also “watch out for this reporter, who asks what you want to know”. This second version should also be comma-less, if it wasn’t wordplay… if it is, the strange punctuation is part of the wordplay.
Nava, I think that would be an incomplete sentence (which do show up in newspapers sometimes, admittedly.) You’d have to add a main clause, or remove the “quien” altogether.
But I like your regionalism/pun interpretation! That could be it!
RAE, 9th definition of “calar (as verb)”: to know somebody’s intent and qualities. 10: understand the reasons for something or the secrets behind it.
JKellyMap, Spanish doesn’t always require an explicit verb, same as it doesn’t always require an explicit subject. Heck, right now I happen to be reading some Charlie Chan novels, courtesy of Project Gutenberg Australia, and there are quite a few sentences like that: descriptions with the verb ellided… and it’s English, Word keeps painting those lines green.
Wow, that explains a lot – thanks, Nava. I always wondered why so many dissertations and articles in Spanish sounded to me like they had been written by a third-grader – it’s because of what English speakers would call incomplete or run-on sentences (the latter is especially common.)
So, how is such a sentence translated? Do you insert an “is”, or ignore the “who”?
It would depend on what flowed better; I think in this case it flows best by treating it as my first interpretation and with the “is” added.
One of the things that ping my own radar about many translations from English is… you guessed it: too many words which someone speaking in Spanish would never explicit. It’s one of the Great Debates of translation: what is more “true” to the original, a translation that’s more word-by-word, or one that sounds more natural in the target language?
To give an example of Spanish sentences that are run-on ones in English, see one of the sentences I wrote in the post above:
“I always wondered why so many dissertations and articles in Spanish sounded to me like they had been written by a third-grader – it’s because of what English speakers would call incomplete or run-on sentences (the latter is especially common.)”
Many Spanish writers would dispense with the dashes and the parentheses, and instead just use commas, so that in directly translated English it would come out:
"I always wondered why so many dissertations and articles in Spanish sounded to me like they had been written by a third-grader, it's because of what English speakers would call incomplete or run-on sentences, the latter is especially common."
And that’s actually only a change in punctuation. Spanish doesn’t use those dashes, it took me years to find out what the heck were “n-dashes” and “m-dashes” and to figure out how to use English punctuation. Most of my ESL teachers never went into punctuation beyond “it’s the same as in Spanish” (the same, mine Spanish bum).
Actually, the Spanish-style punctuation would still have either the parenthesis (which are a lot more common in Spanish than in English, which explains how come I overuse them, which I know I do but I digress…) or a semicolon instead of that comma.
And the answer is that there is more than a correct way to translate something. So long as the meaning is understood and the translation doesn’t grate on anybody who isn’t a professional nitpicker, the rest is nits to be picked.
Since it’s essentially the front page of an online newspaper, and it’s always there, the idea that it is wordplay makes a lot of sense. The wordplay requires two commas in one interpretation, but none in the other, so they split the difference and kept the least distracting one.
The English translation you gave could actually use the comma in that position, although it would be unnecessary. Are you saying Spanish cannot?
I’m not sure I understand the question… Spanish cannot use what comma? The original Spanish has one comma, and the whole sentence is an example of how punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence: the sentence would have one meaning with two commas, a different one with no commas, and by having that strange punctuation it makes that single comma part of the wordplay. I’ve mentioned before how I have memories of some ten relatives on Dad’s side spending a whole Saturday afternoon debating whether one sentence in the Constitution which was being put to the vote should have a comma, a semicolon or nothing - because each punctuation variety had a different meaning (the words were the same; that’s right, over 4 hours debating a single punctuation mark or lack thereof).