Argentine Spanish is strewn with words and colorful phrases from Lunfardo, a rich vocabulary born on the streets of Buenos Aires in the second half of the 19th century. Now considered a fixture of the Spanish language in Argentina (especially in and around Buenos Aires) and Uruguay, linguists cite the use of Lunfardo as a defining characteristic of the Rioplatense dialect. Add a dash of Argentine flavor to your Spanish vocabulary with the Transpanish blog’s ongoing feature highlighting some of the most frequently used terms in Lunfardo.

In Lunfardo, the word “morfar” means to eat, especially in a hearty, voracious or gluttonous manner. Other possible informal English translations of the word include to get some grub, to get some chow, to chow down, to devour, to wolf down, to gobble (down) and to scarf (down).

In soccer (football) slang, morfar can also be used to indicate that a player hogs the ball.

It’s said that the verb “morfar” stemmed from the French slang word “morfer” meaning—not surprisingly—to eat, although it’s highly likely that both the French and Lunfardo terms arose from the Italian dialect word “morfa,” meaning mouth.

Related words in Lunfardo:
noun morfi: food, grub, chow
noun morfón: glutton, pig, hog

Usage example: Ese chabón es un morfón, se queda con la pelota. // That guy’s a ball hog. He keeps the ball for himself. (He never passes the ball.)

Éstos van en limusina y no tienen para morfar. // These guys ride around in a limo, but they’ve got nothing to eat.

The song Yira yira by the popular 90s Argentine rock band Los Piojos features the word “morfar” in the lyrics.

Cuando rajés los tamangos
buscando ese mango
que te haga morfar
la indiferencia del mundo
que es sordo y es mudo
recién sentirás.

Verás que todo es mentira
verás que nada es amor
que al mundo nada le importa
yira, yira…

Aunque te quiebre la vida
aunque te muerda un dolor
no esperes nunca una mano
ni una ayuda ni un favor.

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English, Spanish and Portuguese comprise three of the top five languages on the Web. Let’s take a look at some statistics reflecting these languages’ influence on the Internet.

English

• Number of native English-speaking users on the Web: 565.0 million (as of May 31, 2011)
  % of English-speaking Internet users with respect to total population of English speakers: 43.4%
• User growth from 2000 to 2011: 301.4%
• Percentage of total Internet users: 26.8% (Overall ranking among top 10 languages: #1)
• % of websites available in English (as of December 31, 2011): 56.6%

Spanish

• Number of native Spanish-speaking users on the Web: 165.0 million (as of May 31, 2011)
• % of Spanish-speaking Internet users with respect to total population of Spanish speakers: 39.0%
• User growth from 2000 to 2011: 807.4%
• Percentage of total Internet users: 7.8% (Overall ranking among top 10 languages: #3)
• % of websites available in Spanish (as of December 31, 2011): 4.6%

Portuguese

• Number of native Portuguese-speaking users on the Web: 82.6 million (as of May 31, 2011)
• % of Portuguese-speaking Internet users with respect to total population of Portuguese speakers: 32.5%
• User growth from 2000 to 2011: 990.1%
• Percentage of total Internet users: 3.9% (Overall ranking among top 10 languages: #5)
• % of websites available in Portuguese (as of December 31, 2011): 2.0%

A quick analysis of the numbers points to the following facts that translation buyers should be aware of:

» Figures show that there’s still a great deal of room for growth among all three languages, in terms of the number of users and the amount of content available. Although English leads the charge as the “language of the Web,” not even half of all English speakers are on the ‘net, and Spanish and Portuguese lag even farther behind. As the economic outlook continues to improve in Latin America and Brazil, user growth among speakers of Spanish and Portuguese should be particularly strong.

» Despite an explosion in the number of Internet users among the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking populations over the last decade, access to content in those languages remains severely limited. Those businesses looking for a competitive edge will invest in translations of their web content into Spanish and/or Portuguese.

Statistical data courtesy of Internet World Stats and Wikipedia

More information on the English Language
More information on the Spanish Language
More information on the Portuguese Language

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Even in the realm of words, 2011 has been a revolutionary year.

Indeed, some words that originated in the spontaneous and unorthodox social media have been finally accepted by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which is by far the most formal dictionary of the English language.

So, slangy words like LOL and OMG are now enjoying the same privileges as businesslike initials that were accepted a long time ago, like FYI and ASAP. That is what I call a linguistic democracy.

The list of words recently accepted by OED, as of December, contains compound nouns that certainly reflect our current times. Take for instance “abatement notice,” “adaptive expectations,” “adult child,” “cyber-bully,” “worried well,” and “zero emission.”

Under the form cyber, the dictionary even listed “cyberfriend,” “cyberlover” and “cybersnob.” All these sorts of sidereal words explain the acceptance of another word also quite alien like “abhuman,” which means partially human. Then, next to “adultlike,” there is this other intriguing word “adulticide,” which I wrongly assumed as related to the killing of adults, by that I mean humans, but the dictionary defines it as “an agent used to kill the adult forms of a pest or parasite.”

This year’s linguistic openness has apparently brought 400 new words into the OED. As its chief editor John Simpson proudly announces, there are over 102,000 new and revised entries “and counting” since March 2000.

More spicy words like “sexting” and “mankini” have also been recently added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. However, I could not find them when I searched the online version of the OED.

What I did find is the addition of more Spanish words.

So, along with words already widely accepted in the English language, such as bonanza, corral, mucho, patio, sombrero, and torero (which my computer does not underline as I write them), new words have been added, like “abundante cautela” (extreme caution), “abuela” (grandmother) and “abuelo” (grandfather).

Curiously, two more words have been included only in their female form, such as “abuelita” (dear grandmother) and “gordita” (little fat woman).

Believe it or not, “gordita” is an affectionate nickname quite common in Latin American countries. Why? Well, food is not a stigma when hunger remains a social issue.

Among the 400 new entries of 2011, we also can find old words with new meanings. That is the case of “bruising,” “charger,” “speculate” and “warrant.”

I wonder when “occupy” will join this list of new senses. Without a doubt, this verb has lost all naivety after Occupy Wall Street and its different variations appeared this year in the urban American landscape.

By the way, there is a rural version of this movement in my own country. As I am writing this column, thousands of farmers in northern Peru are occupying a series of lakes in the Andes, at more than 12,000 feet above sea level, to defend their rights to water against a mining project.

Yes, 2011 has been a turbulent year with plenty of raised fists and even pepper sprays. But while claims and chants might come and go, some new words and meanings are here to stay.

Alessia Leathers is a Peruvian journalist and a published writer. She moved to Cape Coral in 2003.

Source: http://www.news-press.com/article/20111225/NEWS0101/312250030/Found-translation-2011-year-word-acceptance-slang-social-media?odyssey=mod%7cnewswell%7ctext%7c%7cs

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Given the pervasive use of the Spanish language in the United States, some would argue that Spanish should no longer be considered a foreign language. With roughly 40 million people in the United States speaking Spanish, the language has permeated American society and deserves greater respect. As a highly visible and daily aspect of many Americans’ lives, Spanish has evolved into the United States’ second language rather than a foreign language.

Although English predominates within the nation’s corporate boardrooms, the halls of government and the court system, both corporate America and the government increasingly recognize the role of Spanish in the U.S. Companies now woo potential customers with Spanish language advertising and social media campaigns, the court system offers Spanish language interpreters for proceedings, and an office of the U.S. government’s General Services Administration (GSA) works to ensure the proper use of Spanish by federal agencies.

Spanish speakers in North America even have their own organization known as the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española — ANLE (North American Academy of the Spanish Language) to define Spanish language standards. Recognized as the authority regarding Spanish language use in the United States, ANLE works in conjunction with Gobierno USA, the U.S. government’s Spanish language portal, to ensure the correct usage of Spanish in all official communications by government entities. According to a member of ANLE, the federal government translates more documents into Spanish than any other minority language, highlighting its importance.

Just as Spanish speakers in other countries have their own particular idioms, the mix of cultures and “flavors” of Spanish combined with a strong influence by English has produced idioms unique to U.S. Spanish. ANLE is currently working to compile a list of these idioms for inclusion in a dictionary that captures the words and phrases unique to the Spanish spoken within the United States.

ANLE looks to standardize the usage of U.S. Spanish, which will pay off later with translations that are more faithful to the nuances found in American Spanish. It’s also important to highlight that Spanglish, an informal mix of Spanish and English, does not represent or define proper use of the Spanish language in the United States, although U.S. Spanish speakers have had a difficult time shedding this image.

A professor at the University of California at Berkeley sums up the debate about Spanish as a  foreign language versus a second language, like so: “Despite the quotidian presence of Spanish in the state of California, the voice of Spanish speaking Californians is strikingly absent from the Spanish I curriculum at UC Berkeley. …perhaps the reconceptualization of Spanish as a second language must start with students such as mine who expressed that their goals for Spanish were neither touristic nor global-economical, but immediately practical– they want to be able to communicate with individuals with whom they share a home state but not a means of communication.”[1]

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Argentine Spanish is strewn with words and colorful phrases from Lunfardo, a rich vocabulary born on the streets of Buenos Aires in the second half of the 19th century. Now considered a fixture of the Spanish language in Argentina (especially in and around Buenos Aires) and Uruguay, linguists cite the use of Lunfardo as a defining characteristic of the Rioplatense dialect. Add a dash of Argentine flavor to your Spanish vocabulary with the Transpanish blog’s ongoing feature highlighting some of the most frequently used terms in Lunfardo.

In Lunfardo, the word “quilombo” means a mess, scandal, uproar, disorder, or conflict. In the past, quilombo strictly referred to brothels or so-called houses of ill repute; however, as the term evolved, it began to be applied to disorganized or messy conditions or situations of conflict. Nowadays, quilombo is rarely used in its original Spanish sense of brothel/whorehouse.

It’s said that the origins of the word “quilombo” can be traced to the word “kilombo” from the African language Kimbundu. Use of the word dates to Argentina’s colonial era, when it made reference to a hideout, particularly for fugitive slaves.

Related words in Lunfardo:

noun or adj quilombero/a: troublemaker, rabble-rouser; rowdy, noisy, disorderly

noun bolonqui (the word “quilombo” with the syllables written in reverse)

verb quilombear: to cause a disturbance

Usage examples:
¡Esta habitación es un quilombo! // This room is a mess!

The word “quilombo” appears in a chant frequently sung by fans at football (soccer) games in Argentina.

Si lo tiran a [insert team or player name here] al bombo, va a haber quilombo, va a haber quilombo.

Another popular chant includes the word “quilombera”:

Vamos, vamos, Argentina,
vamos, vamos a ganar,
que esta barra quilombera
no te deja, no te deja de alentar.

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When creating advertising campaigns, website content, or other materials geared toward a diverse Hispanic audience, companies are wise to consider the use of neutral Spanish (sometimes known as international Spanish). Translators and writers employing neutral Spanish seek to produce a text that is universally understood by Spanish speakers by avoiding regionalisms and colloquial language that hint at a particular dialect.

Multinational corporations with employees spread across the globe benefit from the use of neutral Spanish when translating manuals and corporate communications, as translation costs can be contained by producing one broadly understood text rather than translating into various dialects of Spanish. The same holds true forU.S.companies employing a significant number of Hispanic workers, who most likely hail from different parts of the Spanish-speaking world.

Conversely, it’s often desirable to target the text to a specific group of Spanish speakers. For example, if a company launches a product in Latin America, consumers will identify more closely with the product and the campaign if an effort is made to tailor the copy to reflect idioms and vocabulary employed in theAmericasrather than inSpain.

Challenges Inherent to Selecting Neutral Terms

While producing a text in neutral Spanish may sound simple, the fact is that identifying neutral terms is quite challenging. The Spanish language is rich with variants, and a true neutral Spanish does not exist in the real world (think Received Pronunciation in the U.K.or Standard American English in the U.S.). As such, translators may encounter difficulties when trying to determine the appropriate term to use when the target audience is a group as diverse as U.S. Hispanics or Spanish speakers worldwide. For instance, the word “car” can be translated as carro, auto, automóvil, or coche. Which term is the most neutral (i.e. widely understood)?

It’s important to learn as much as possible about the text’s target audience before beginning the translation. If possible, try to determine which region or country most of the Hispanics in your target audience come from (e.g.Spain, the Caribbean,South America). For example, if you’re translating a text to be used in the court system of the State ofCalifornia, that state’s Latino population consists largely of Mexicans or those of Mexican descent, so you may want to favor Mexican vocabulary if you’re undecided about the best term to use.

Search Tips for Neutral Spanish Terms

The key to translating a text to neutral Spanish is selecting the vocabulary that will be most widely understood by Spanish speakers, regardless of their background.

1. Consult several dictionaries to determine all possible translations of a term. Resources such as the DRAE and Jergas de Habla Hispana are particularly useful for identifying the countries or regions where a particular term is utilized.

2. Perform a search for the term you think is the most neutral in the Spanish language version of Google (click on the option at left that says “Buscar sólo páginas en español” to ensure that any stray English language results are removed).

3. Compare search results for different terms and see which one has more hits.

Selecting Terms to Target a Specific Group of Spanish Speakers

If most of your target population come from a particular country, then search for terms in the version of Google specific to that country. For example, in the case of Argentina, search at google.com.ar. Click here for a list of all the countries with specific Google sites.

Excluding Countries from Your Search

When translating for a particular country or region, you may want to remove certain results from your search. For example, if you’re targeting Latin America, you will want to search in the Spanish language version of Google without seeing results from Spain. To remove results from a specific country, type your search term and then site:-.xx, where xx represents the country’s domain extension (.es forSpain, .ar for Argentina, etc.).

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Knowledge of any Romance language automatically offers learners a leg-up when they undertake the study of another language in that family; however, those with a solid base in Spanish have a particular advantage when it comes to studying Portuguese, given that the two languages share a great deal of vocabulary and similar grammar. While linguistic differences certainly exist between Spanish and Portuguese, language learners with a strong background in Spanish will find obtaining fluency in Portuguese to be a very attainable goal (and vice versa for Portuguese speakers).

Linguists have determined that Spanish shares an 89% lexical similarity (the degree to which the word sets of any two languages are similar) with Portuguese,[1] and, overall, the two languages exhibit a fair degree of mutual intelligibility, roughly 50% according to one study.[2] With such a large chunk of shared vocabulary and closely related grammars, those with Spanish fluency can read and understand a significant portion of a text written in Portuguese, although understanding the spoken word presents a greater challenge due to considerable pronunciation differences.

Spanish speakers studying Portuguese must make an effort to avoid two main mistakes. First, while the two languages do share quite a bit of vocabulary, they are also rife with false cognates (also known as false friends). False cognates can make for some rather confusing (and occasionally, entertaining!) situations. Don’t fall for them—make an effort to memorize which words are false friends. Second, avoid lapsing into portuñol, the dialect best described as a mix of Spanish and Portuguese. Spanish speakers just beginning their Portuguese studies may be tempted to use Spanish pronunciation, grammar constructions or vocabulary when their Portuguese fails them; however, it’s important to respect the differences between the two languages and keep them separate.

Check out the website Tá Falado with podcasts and lessons geared toward Spanish speakers looking to learn Brazilian Portuguese.

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A recently published study in the journal Language presented evidence that Spanish ranks as the world’s second fastest commonly spoken language, just behind Japanese. Linguistics researchers from the University of Lyon in France discovered that native speakers of Spanish talk faster than speakers of languages such as English, German or Mandarin Chinese; however, the trade-off lies in that Spanish speakers transmit less information per second as compared with these languages.

Researchers performed an analysis to determine the average information density of a syllable in each of the seven languages included in the study. Investigators found that languages with greater information density per average syllable are characterized by slower speech; therefore, dense languages such as English and Chinese are spoken more slowly, while low-density languages like Spanish and Japanese are spoken much faster in comparison. “Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information.”

Read more about this study in an article available at the Time Magazine website.

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Argentine Spanish is strewn with words and colorful phrases from Lunfardo, a rich vocabulary born on the streets of Buenos Aires in the second half of the 19th century. Now considered a fixture of the Spanish language in Argentina (especially in and around Buenos Aires) and Uruguay, linguists cite the use of Lunfardo as a defining characteristic of the Rioplatense dialect. Add a dash of Argentine flavor to your Spanish vocabulary with the Transpanish blog’s ongoing feature highlighting some of the most frequently used terms in Lunfardo.

In Lunfardo, the word “pibe” means kid or boy. While the word is unique to the Rioplatense dialect, experts in Lunfardo disagree on its origins. Some say that “pibe” is derived from the word “pive” of the Genoese dialect of Italian, meaning “errand boy” or “apprentice.” Another possible candidate for the forerunner of “pibe” is pivello or pivèll, of the dialect of Lombardy, meaning “youth” or, again, “apprentice.”

An alternative theory—one that feels like more of a stretch—posits that the origin of “pibe” lies in the word “pebete,” a term meaning incense, which arose from Catalan. The thought is that “pebete” came to refer to a boy or kid in an ironic sense, given that active young boys/adolescents are prone to some unattractive odors—the complete opposite of the pleasant smell of incense.

Related words in Lunfardo: piba (girl)

Usage examples:  Diego Maradona, one of Argentina’s greatest soccer players, was nicknamed “El Pibe de Oro” or “The Golden Boy.”

The word “pibe” appears in the lyrics of the 1945 tango “El sueño del pibe” by Juan Puey and Reinaldo Yiso.

El sueño del pibe

Golpearon la puerta de la humilde casa,
la voz del cartero muy clara se oyó,
y el pibe corriendo con todas sus ansias
al perrito blanco sin querer pisó.

“Mamita, mamita”, se acercó gritando;
la madre extrañada dejó el piletón
y el pibe le dijo riendo y llorando:
“El club me ha mandado hoy la citación”.

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