In an old magazine cartoon, set in pre-Castro Cuba, a government official reads an official order:
“By order of His Excellency, General Batista, the wearing of beards by Cuban citizens is strictly forbidden. Anyone caught without a shave will be…”
In the foreground, a solitary Fidel Castro, with a worried look, feels his beard.
I wanted to translate the order into Spanish: “Por orden de Su Excelencia, el General Batista, se prohibe estrictamente que los ciudadanos cubanos se ponen las barbas. Si la policía encuentran un ciudadano que no se hubiera afeitado…”
Is this translation correct? (I avoid online translators, which give wrong-word translations and tend to leave some words not translated at all.)
I don’t speak Cuban Spanish but I lived in Miami for 4 years and I don’t think I ever heard anybody use ponerse barba like that. Ponerse would imply that the beard can be put on and taken off, that is, it’s a fake. Also, the verbal tense is wrong: it would be se pongan; they used the indicative where it should have been a subjunctive. I don’t recall Cubans using las barbas often, IIRC they normally used barba same as we do in Spain.
In Spain and respecting the structure they’ve used we’d say se prohíbe que los ciudadanos cubanos lleven barba.
If it said se prohíbe que los ciudadanos cubanos se dejen barba (or las barbas, or la barba).
it would be banning only growing a new beard, but preexisting ones wouldn’t be banned, which would at the very least be a legal mess.
The rest sounds fine except for a couple of missed diacritic marks.
“La Policía encuentre”, since in this case “la Policía” refers to an agency, you’d use the singular. Had you said “los policías”, you would be referring to multiple officers, and thus, the plural verb “encuentren” would apply. Also, you need to use the subjunctive.
“sin afeitarse” would be a simpler rendering.
That said there is no mention made of the Police (department) in the original English. Another translation could be, “Por orden de Su Excelencia, el General Batista, se prohiben las barbas a los ciudadanos cubanos*. A cualquier ciudadano que se deje la barba, se le…”
Suggested by two speakers of Puerto Rican Spanish.
*Note that nationality is not capitalized in Spanish.
I would have put that “find” in the indicative, si la Policía encuentra… agreed that it’s singular.
It would be in the subjunctive with other prepositions or prepositional constructions, for example cuando la Policía encuentre… or (en) caso de que la Policía encuentre… (there’s dialects where that construction would normally have the en and others where it wouldn’t).
Well, I assume that the bureaucrat reading the notice would be a* habañera speaking to other habañeras *(and that Castro himself, of course, is a habañera), and Havana dialect would prevail. I took Spanish in college and my Spanish there was more Mexican- and South American-oriented.
They would never be “habañeros”: habaneros, maybe, but no tilde. Fidel Castro was born in Holguín, not La Habana, so he isn’t an habanero - since he has a polla and a pair of huevos, he’d not be a habanera even if he happened to have been born in La Habana (unless he also happened to be a transexual, which to the best of my knowledge he is not).
The singular/plural, gender of people and indicative/subjunctive grammar works the same way on both sides of the pond; Mexican usage is not closer to Cuban usage than Spanish usage.
I am thankful to those who have made corrections in my translation, although I think they give too much space to simple things like gender and number (as with “habanera” and “habanero,” for example.)
In this regard, German seems easier than Spanish or even Russian: Achtung! Verboten die wilden Tiere zu füttern.
Ask your Mexican husband whether his teacher of Lengua Española would also have considered it correct. There is more to a correct translation than getting the meaning across (which the OP’s translation did and he already knew he had); that one contained several grammatical mistakes.
Well, I was told by a Spanish speaking person that “quiero me beses” was correct, and “quiero que me beses” was wrong, so I’m starting to wonder if there are places where bad grammar is actually considered correct
