3 Common Problems in Translating Documents from English-Spanish and Vice Versa

How will you translate the English word ‘fish’ into Spanish? Will you use ‘pez,’ which means a swimming fish in the river or will you use ‘pescado,’ which means a dead fish that is cleaned and kept ready for the frying pan. While in English, you can use the same word for both the scenarios, Spanish makes the distinction obligatory. And it is up to the intuition of the translator to make the correct interpretation.

Similarly there are a lot of instances when the translation between English and Spanish can be tricky and in most cases the major reason for this is the three fundamental differences between the two languages. Let’s take a look at each of these in detail.

Grammar

Though both English and Spanish use the same Subject-Verb-Object sentence structure, the grammatical rules that govern sentence formation in both the languages are quite different. Grammatical rules in Spanish are not very sturdy and give you the freedom to use different structures, while this is not the case with English. Also, unlike English, the subject that is doing the action is often placed at the end of the sentence in Spanish. That is, in Spanish, if we want to say that John threw the ball, the literal syntax might sound something like “the ball threw it John.”

Vocabulary

Just like the other Romance languages, major portion of the Spanish language is derived from Latin. Whereas, the Anglo-Saxon language, English, has comparatively witnessed very little influence from Latin. Hence, many words used regularly in Spanish have formal cognates that are very rarely used in English.

Punctuation marks

Punctuation rules between English and Spanish are exactly the opposite in many cases. For instance in English, all punctuation marks inside a quote or parentheses are placed within, while in Spanish, it is placed outside. This has been a bone of contentions in many occasions.

All these issues prove that English-Spanish or Spanish-English translation is definitely not an easy task. High proficiency is required for performing flawless and authentic translation, and this is where we have made our business. Our professional team of expert translators is aware of all the syntactic differences in text in both the languages and seamlessly re-arranges them in a logical way to ensure they flow well in the target language. In addition, they are also trained to keep an eye on the context and the level of formality needed within the document. We have also added an additional layer of check by delegating the final task to team of expert proofreaders and editors. It is because of these reasons that we believe we are second to none in Spanish-English or English-Spanish translation.