Help me write a sentence in Spanish that is wrong in this precise way

February 8, 2021 9:40 AM

I work with people whose first language is Spanish. They speak English well, but their writing is... not great. Part of my job is to help them with their business writing so that it is in clear and precise English. They go to the thesaurus a lot, which ends up making their writing worse, not better. I want to give them an example sentence in Spanish of what they're doing.

Here's an example I corrected this week:

They meant to say something like "Instructors should be enforcing these required actions with their students."

They wrote "Instructors should enforcing these metrics with their students."

My guess here is that they translated "medidas," which can mean both "measures" and "actions" in Spanish, and found that it can mean both of those things in English. as well Then they chose the wrong word (measures, not actions) to look up in the thesaurus, and found "metrics," and then wrote the sentence.

Metrics is a synonym for *one* meaning of "medidas," but not the *right* one.

Can someone help me come up with a sentence in Spanish I could share with them that would function in the same way? If you can, please explain to me which word is wrong, and how someone who doesn't speak Spanish as a first language, but uses a thesaurus, could have gotten to that sentence.

posted by tzikeh to Writing & Language (10 answers total)

I've encountered this when reading in translation, and it's always fun =)

My favorite example was where "kid" wound up translated as "cabrito" rather than "niño" as was intended by the author.

(I know you asked for sentences, but while I can read reasonably well my Spanish isn't good enough to confidently write.)
posted by Metasyntactic at 10:08 AM on February 8, 2021

Would "pintarse los clavos" work? Paint one's nails (the kind you hit with a hammer, not fingernails)
posted by abeja bicicleta at 10:09 AM on February 8, 2021 [6 favorites]

I just saw this sentence in a faculty handbook:

The department chair is charged with appointing a suitable replacement.

A couple of legitimate missteps gives us:

Al sillón del departamento le cobran amoblar un reemplazo adecuado.


chair=both furniture (sillón) and administrative appointment (jefe de area); charge= to assign duties (cargar) or o demand payment (cobrar); appoint=name a person to a position (nombrar) or furnish an apartment (amoblar)
posted by dr. boludo at 10:42 AM on February 8, 2021 [6 favorites]

can you give some info as to which spanish they speak? examples may be easier to find if we could target the regional type.
posted by alchemist at 11:29 AM on February 8, 2021

Response by poster: SageTrail - no offense meant or taken. Sorry if my words came across as harsh or condescending -- not what I intended to communicate (funnily enough).

I'll stop responding as I know this isn't a back-and-forth, but I wanted to clarify to you that I wasn't frustrated or anything -- just (ha) poor word choice to state boring facts.
posted by tzikeh at 12:30 PM on February 8, 2021

Don't let them use a thesaurus at all. A thesaurus is intended for those who are fluent in the language. A non-fluent writer will not have a sense of meaning, shading, and emphasis that allows for good use of the reference book.
posted by yclipse at 4:08 PM on February 8, 2021

How about this?
Abre el candado con la llave
Open the lock with the tap (wrong)/ the key (right)
posted by dhruva at 4:19 PM on February 8, 2021

There is a spy novel by Eric Ambler that begins with confusion between (nasal) congestion (what I patient had) and constipation (what the doctor thought he meant).
posted by SemiSalt at 4:36 AM on February 9, 2021

As a polyglot (I speak English, Mandarin, Cantonese, and intermediate Spanish), I find that this is often caused by the student's inability to THINK in English. If they are still composing the sentence in Spanish, and translating it into English, then they will ALWAYS have this sort of problem one way or another. You can teach them all the vocabulary in the world, but they are not really learning English. They are learning vocabulary in English (see the difference?)

With that said, different people learn languages differently. Some people task switch when they switch languages. Some people are so fluent in both they switch seamlessly, utilizing vocab from multiple languages in the same sentence. Though it seems that your students are Spanish speakers taking some business ESL and writing courses.

I like the idea of stop using the thesaurus. I agree that it's probably confusing them as they don't understand the nuances and/or connotations of each word to be using them, so they shouldn't. At least, not yet.

However, I have no teaching experience nor credentials, so just chalk it up to a keyboard warrior's rambling if it doesn't fit your paradigm. :D
posted by kschang at 1:10 PM on February 9, 2021

If using outside resources is OK, I recommend they use WordReference. It's a free multilingual dictionary search, with especially good support for breaking a common word into particular shades of meaning, including a follow-up section full of idioms that use that word. It also as an appendix linking to threads from the associated forum that mention the word, so people can review related discussion of particularly tough cases.
posted by Rhaomi at 8:45 PM on February 10, 2021