I was asked if the website and its content would be in Spanish as well as English.  Of course.  I cannot imagine anyone writing about HispanicLatinos in English not having their websites in passable-enough Spanish.  The times call for making sure that anything written about the more-than-50-million-member HispanicLatino community is translated well.  Falling short of that falls short of history.

But about translating English into Spanish and Spanish into English: Is there anything more difficult?  Words that mean one thing in one household can signify something else next door.  The nuances in verb tenses are critical yet imperfect – pun very much intended.

So, what to do?  Computerized translations while instantaneous take you so far, thus every line must make the best use of dictionaries and thesauruses – including the bank of words that memory has stored in vaults long not opened, of words not long heard.

The process at first can be daunting but soon enough both languages reveal their artful beauty.  A quiet thrill that I cannot put into words in either idiom ripples through me upon encountering a word my parents used that has meandered in meaning.  ¿Y este laberinto? my mother would ask upon arriving at home to find not a place of intricate passageways and blind alleys but a chaos of rowdy kids.

In the end, there will be errors and typos but the exercise is more than about affixing meaning to language.

It is about affixing meaning to one’s life.

Next: Tilting at Immigration

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