At this point, every “Sysco” branded item is labeled in English and Spanish. It’s Sysco recognizing that a good portion of foodservice workers in the USA are now Mexican.
(The occasional French labeling I mentioned in the OP is restricted to products that are also being exported to Canada, or imported from Canada.)
On a side note, it’s been kinda fun looking at Spanish labeling and recognizing the Latin roots. Like, labels on spices.
English: Ground Cumin
Spanish: Comino en polvo
“en polvo” = “pulverized”
Which is another instance where English does not equal Spanish. The English word, “pulverized” tends to be used in the sense of “completely destroyed” when, in reality, it just means, “pounded into powder”. In English, “ground”, or “grinded” (probably coming from German) implies a tedious task, while “pulverised” implies an instantaneous pounding into powder. In Spanish, “en polvo” simply means grinding something into powder.
Plásticos. When we’re painting a room and we lie down plastic on the floor, we protect the floor poniendo plásticos. Or lonetas (woven), or hules (oilcloth).
According to my uncle, he understood it when he realized that the eye on which he had the cataract first was “like looking through a waterfall”.
It could be given in the infinitive, mantener congelado, but the word you were looking for is mantenga. There is a tendency to give instructions in the infinitive to avoid the tú/usted/vos conflict.
Congelar comes from the root -gel-, ice. Same root as hielo or gelato.
In Spanish, those same fats se han solidificado or, more exactly, se han gelatinizado (but you would only see that in a technical document); it would be more common to say hay gelatina or se ha hecho gelatina. And hacer(se) gelatina can refer both to fats congealing and to something melting down figuratively: después de la carrera de ayer, tengo los huesos hechos gelatina - after yesterday’s race, my bones feel like jelly. Cuando vio a su bebé se hizo gelatina - when he saw his baby he just melted into a puddle. Cuando se enfría el caldo, se hace una capa de gelatina encima y la puedes quitar - when the stock cools down, a layer of jelly forms on top and you can separate it.
Yeah, but that’s not what it means in Italian. It’s just ice cream. The fact that languages will sometimes copy a word from another language as a partial substitution for one that already existed doesn’t change its meaning in the original language. Spanish using sponsor for mecenas deportivo doesn’t change the meaning of sponsor in English; American English using gelato for a specific type or grade of ice cream doesn’t change the meaning in Italian.
Why would you assume that translations for products made by US-based companies are generated by Google Translate? There are plenty of professional native Spanish-speaking translators in the U.S., and there’s no reason one would have to use a U.S.-based translator, for that matter.
(There is plenty of awful translation in the U.S., though.)
“False friends” are a common problem in translation. Hence all those holiday snaps people take of products like “Cock Soup” and attempts at English notices: “Drop your trousers here for best results” (advertising a dry-cleaner’s), not to mention the impossibility of literally translating swearwords, where the scales of force and offensiveness can be very different in different languages and cultures.
FWIW “pellicule” exists in French as film (i.e, roll film for a camera, rather than movies) - and dandruff.
And in the UK we commonly call the stuff in question “Cling wrap”.
No, I stand corrected. They’re examples of OP’s original point about understanding context for the effective translation of meanings.
A false friend would be more like the French “assister à” (=to be present at, not to assist at or with), or countless swearwords, which have completely different levels of force and offensiveness in different languages: but I suppose that’s a different subject.
It’s also different than American ice cream. Italian Gelato has less milk fat typically and lower overrun (how much air is beaten into it.) it has a different, thicker texture than American style ice cream. If packaged, gelato would not meet FDA labeling standards to be labeled “ice cream” based on the milk fat content.
That said, $5 a scoop? That’s expensive. My favorite gelato place here is under $3 ($2.25 IIRC) for a small portion which is still more than enough gelato for me.
Sadly, the translation market’s bottom is currently being held by Chinese agencies which use, yep, Google translate. There is no way in God’s green Earth, or any other worlds, that a human being doing something other than a double copy-paste would have produced some of the “professional translations done by an actual agency” that I have seen; on several occasions I’ve proven to someone who’d hired a “professional agency” that the worst errors were exactly what Google gave.
Oh, I’m sure there are translations out there done by Google Translate (or other machine translation). But some people do actually care about quality, even in the U.S., and hire professionals.
(And I’ve seen actual humans, even actual bilingual humans, do truly awful translations. We’ve had multiple people in my office, actual bilingual people, who did translations that were completely nonsensical. How? They simply didn’t pay attention to context or whether the finished product made sense as freestanding text. Those people don’t work there anymore. Once we advertised for a bilingual paralegal and the interview included a very simple language test; write a letter in Spanish notifying someone of an appointment. Basically everyone failed the test. If you take an hour to write a three-sentence letter and the end result has 15 grammar and spelling errors, sorry, but you’re not bilingual, I don’t care what language you speak with your mom.)
Why would you assume that’s what I was assuming? I said might have. Of course some companies use professional translators, but it’s obvious from the number of awful translations that a lot of people are using Google Translate or half-remembered high school Spanish.
Same goes for the other way here. Despite the fact that there are a lot of native English speakers in Panama, you still see a lot of awful translations even in professional contexts. You would think they could just grab a native English speaker and have them check it over, but apparently that’s too much trouble.
Google translate is more complicated than just picking the first answer in the dictionary. It works by comparing to other translations. It determines the meaning by the words around the word, if possible. If a particular translation is usually used around these words, then it is used. It only falls back on the most popular translation if this fails.
I wonder how much Google Translate is starting to eat its own children?
IOW, it “learns” by reading translations on the 'net. But if lots of them are docs that folks translated earlier by Google Translate (or any other machine algorithm) then the algorithm is consuming its earlier, less skillful works as training materials.
That sounds like the automated equivalent of the inmates taking over the asylum.
I said might have. Of course some companies use professional translators, but it’s obvious from the number of awful translations that a lot of people are using Google Translate or half-remembered high school Spanish.