¿Como se dice "Reprogram the remote"?

December 25, 2010 6:01 PM

Can anyone recommend a good, inexpensive English-Spanish lexicon of TV/Cable/Broadcast technology terms? My sister does Spanish-language technical support for a large TV cable and Internet provider. She's first-language fluent in Spanish, but like many Spanish-speaking U.S. natives, leans heavily on Spanglish for many of the neologisms ("el remote") of the electronic age.

That's fine for all the U.S.-born Latinos she speaks with who know as much Spanglish as she does, but for more recent arrivals from Spanish-speaking countries, she needs to know the real Spanish words.

So, I'm looking for a good, inexpensive English-Spanish lexicon of TV/Cable/Broadcast technology terms, or, better yet, a reliable web page. Stuff that includes Internet terminology is a bonus, but not the primary concentration. It's mainly about TV, cable, wireless remotes, set-top boxes and the like.

posted by toodleydoodley to technology (4 answers total)

Does she have any coworkers at her job who can help her with these terms? I know that's not what you're looking for, but that seems like the obvious answer here, since they presumably say the words themselves on a daily basis.
posted by telegraph at 6:31 PM on December 25, 2010

When I was looking into moving to Mexico I found that the cable/internet companies used many Spanglish terms (A DVR is called a Digital Video Recorder) just like in the US. I was looking for some sort of list of terms but couldn't find anything helpful and just muddled through the websites and was happy to see all the espanglés.

The remote was called "el control remoto." A lot of times I'd see email instead of correo, etc. And a lot of time the Spanish word for an English term like "snow" or "ghost" will just be the exact translation.

Even the marketing of bundles of TV+Internet+Phone have similar names like Cablemas calls their TV+Internet package "Doble Play" where it might be called Double Play by Time Warner in the US.

I've seen the cable boxes referred to as cajas (boxes). A lot of the boxes are the same models we have in the US complete with English labels on the buttons so there's words like "power" and "guide" on the remotes and boxes.

Unfortunately, the support sites for the Cablemas (cablemas.com.mx) and Megacable (megacable.com.mx) do not have exhaustive support pages like the US English market. If I were your sister. I'd check out the websites of the big Latin American cable providers and see how they use the terms (there will be differences between Mexico, Argentina, and even within countries, just as there's regional differences in US Spanish).

I'd also look at US cable companies' sites Spanish sites(Cox San Diego) but most of the Spanish language stuff is for selling the cable and paying the bill. And look at all the other big CableCos/Satellite/ISPs ther than where you sister works.
posted by birdherder at 7:09 PM on December 25, 2010

There might be some stuff in Termium, for free, and some in the Translation Bureau's lexicons. I'd also look in the sources the Bureau used to build these tools for pointers.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 11:47 PM on December 25, 2010

thanks for these, especially the Termium list - the Trilingual Internet Glossary had a lot of telecom/cable terms and specifically referenced some of the institutional terms my sister recently learned.

thanks also for the Cox San Diego site - good use of institutional technical spanish.

My sister will be relieved she'll be able to get up to speed quickly. She's been leaning on her coworkers hard during the training period, but now she'll be expected to run the phone full time, with less coaching.

thanks guys!
posted by toodleydoodley at 9:53 AM on December 26, 2010