Well, suffice to say my spanish blog has sucked a lot of time out of me and it’s because my blog community is so responsive to the text I write and I believe I have developed a sort of friedship with some of them. Well, after all they are from my native city and we have lots of common, I just can believe how great this blogger thing can be! I know, I sound so cliché but it’s true! I just love it.
Anyways, our good friend Logovo answered an observation on a blog post in Spanish [ Tijuana en el Exilio : Thursday, April 17, 2003 ] I made regarding the direct translation of a well known phrase in English ( I can’t believe I just did that ) to Spanish. It sounded foreign in Spanish, because it is not lexicalized (yet) in Spanish, so I pointed it out to her and she so kindly said:
” Direct translation… yep, it’s just in my system. This is what happens when I’m trying to say something but my brain will provide me with only one way of saying it. It knows that it’s given an answer and refuses to make an effort to search any further. ” (my italics)
Now, bear in mind that the following text am about to write here is in response to the text and as my Creative Writing teacher Jon Buscall says: you are attacking the text, not the person in question.
I refuse to believe the above mentioned assertion because I know how a bilingual brain works, I had one for 36 years.
I believe in incubation, I think that if you leave the problem in your head long enough, it will provide a solution to the translation issue in question.
However, this is the tricky thing about being bilingual: you must do maintenance work. If you do not balance how you feed your languages it will turn into a lopsided affair.
This happened to me not long ago. The thing is that I only took care of English, you see, I only read and developed my ideas in English. I left Spanish to its own devices, and that’s why many point out that Spanish is the language of the house.
That’s why you can relate when I say that English is more of an “intellectual” issue for me, since I have overdone the idea department to an English only area.
Are casseroles flying yet?