Lunfardo: What Does “Guita” Mean?

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.

The Meaning of Guita

In Lunfardo, the word “guita” means “money” or “cash.” The word “dinero” (money) is not frequently heard in Argentina, with speakers tending to favor the word “plata” instead. The term “guita” is in widespread use throughout Argentina. In addition to guita, you may run across the words “mango,” “vento,” “sope” (a reversal of the syllables in the word “peso”), and “mosca” in a discussion about money. Also the word “guita” is equivalent to cent or “peso” (Argentine currency).

The word “guita” turns up in the lyrics of the tango “Al mundo le falta un tornillo” by José María Aguilar  and Enrique Cadícamo

Todo el mundo está en la estufa,
Triste, amargao y sin garufa,
neurasténico y cortao…
Se acabaron los robustos,
si hasta yo, que daba gusto,
¡cuatro kilos he bajao!
Hoy no hay guita ni de asalto
y el puchero está tan alto
que hay que usar el trampolín.
Si habrá crisis, bronca y hambre,
que el que compra diez de fiambre
hoy se morfa hasta el piolín.

Hoy se vive de prepo
y se duerme apurao.
Y la chiva hasta a Cristo
se la han afeitao…
Hoy se lleva a empeñar
al amigo más fiel,
nadie invita a morfar…

 

Google Strikes Deal to Translate European Patents

Last week Google announced an agreement with the European Patent Office (EPO) to translate approximately 50 million patents using the search giant’s Internet-based translation tool, Google Translate. Google and authorities at the EPO will collaborate to translate patents into 32 different languages.

Patent researchers, scientists and others will be able to conduct searches for patents in German, French and English, the patent authority’s three official languages. The EPO site’s users may then obtain an instant translation of the patent documentation into languages such as Russian, Japanese or Spanish. It’s important to note that these translations are being made available purely for research and information purposes; they are in no way meant to substitute for official patent translations done by professional translators, as mandated by law.

The EPO will grant Google access to all previously translated patents, which amount to some 1.5 million documents in addition to 50,000 new patents per year.

Officials at the patent office expect the project to be finalized by 2014.

For more information, visit EPO.org.

Also read:
The machine translation debate

Google Translate and the Struggle for Accurate Machine Translations

Portuñol: A Blend of Spanish and Portuguese

Portuñol or portunhol – a dialect based on code-switching between Spanish and Portuguese – has resulted from prolonged contact between the inhabitants of border areas. Emerging over time as a sort of lingua franca for those living in immigrant communities or in trade zones where speakers lacked fluency in the other group’s language, portuñol can be described as a hybrid mixture of Spanish and Portuguese with a smattering of influences from indigenous languages. Portuñol speakers are concentrated in the border areas between Argentina and Brazil, Paraguay and Brazil, and Uruguay and Brazil.

The most uniform and structured variation of portuñol, known as portuñol riverense or fronterizo, is spoken near the Uruguay-Brazil border, specifically in and around the area surrounding the twin cities of Rivera, Uruguay and Santana do Livramento, Brazil. Although most linguists consider portuñol riverense to be primarily a Portuguese-based dialect, other variants of portuñol retain more of a Spanish flavor.

In the past few years, a number of literary works in portuñol have been produced, largely by Uruguayan and Brazilian authors. One of the most celebrated examples of portuñol literature is a novel entitled Mar Paraguayo by Wilson Bueno. The use of portuñol has also risen on the Internet, with websites, blogs and chat rooms dedicated to the dialect.

Top reasons why you should target the Hispanic Community

– There are 48.4 million Hispanics in the US today.

– The Hispanic online population reached a record 20.3 million visitors in February 2009, representing 11 percent of the total U.S. online market.

– The projected Hispanic population of the United States on July 1, 2050 is 132.8 million.. According to this projection, Hispanics will constitute 30 percent of the nation’s population by that date.

– As of 2009 the U.S. Hispanic population ranked second in the world. Only Mexico (111 million) had a larger Hispanic population than the United States.

– Hispanics represent the largest middle class group in the US, and over 88 percent have a household income of $50,000.

– Hispanics spend more than 14 hours online a week.

– The cost of Spanish-language keywords is considerably lower than their English language counterparts.

Still not convinced you should translate your marketing materials to Spanish? Did you know that there are around 358,000,000 million speakers in the world?

 

The Advantages of an Online Spanish Translation Service

Companies with a consistently high volume of translations often resort to hiring in-house translators to meet their needs; however, retaining one or more full-time translators presents various challenges. Working closely with a trusted online Spanish translation service may be a more viable method for getting translations done in a timely manner and at a fair price.

One of the greatest advantages of working with an online Spanish translation service or agency comes from the cost benefits. Hiring a full-time, salaried translator to work in-house can be a pricey affair, particularly for a small to medium-sized company where costs must be more carefully monitored. In addition to the translator’s pay, it’s important to consider the expense of employee benefits, sick time, etc. The company must also provide access to necessary translation tools such as translation memory software and dictionaries, and the cost of licenses quickly adds up.

Some companies may have frequent translation needs but not at a level that would justify the expenses and resources required for an in-house translator. In this case, contracting with an online Spanish translation service represents an excellent approach to meeting a company’s translation demands.

An online Spanish translation service or agency retains a handpicked pool of qualified translators with professional experience and background in a number of different subject areas. While a particular in-house translator may be highly competent when it comes to technical translations, for example, what happens if a complicated legal translation needs to be performed? Working with an online translation agency gives your company access to translators with a broad range of specialties and the flexibility that an in-house employee may not be able to provide. It’s unrealistic to expect one translator to be a “superhero” and do it all.

Lastly, using in-house translators doesn’t guarantee quality translations. A significant advantage of working with a respected online Spanish translation service or agency lies in the numerous quality control measures in place to ensure an excellent final product. In-house translators can produce very high quality work, but generally, additional translators or employees are involved in the proofreading or editing process to ensure the best possible result. When the organization must rely on a team of translators or other employees to get the job done, the company is no longer saving money by having the in-house translator.

“Refudiate” Chosen as 2010 Word of the Year

The New Oxford American Dictionary mulled over pages’ worth of new candidates for the 2010 Word of the Year. Although the technology sector contributed a considerable number of terms to 2009’s field of contenders, this year seemed more heavily influenced by politics, the economy, and current events with words like “Tea Party,” “bankster,” “double-dip” and “top kill.” Technology did manage to chip in with words like “webisode,” “crowdsourcing” and “retweet.”

So, which new word garnered the top spot? “Refudiate” – a word coined by controversial U.S. politician Sarah Palin – was bestowed the title of 2010 Word of the Year by the lexicographers at Oxford. The word, a verb “used loosely to mean ‘reject,’” resulted from a blending of the words “refute” and “repudiate.”

For a complete list of the words considered for the 2010 Word of the Year along with their definitions, have a look at this article from the Oxford University Press blog.

Endangered language opens window on to past

An endangered Greek dialect which is spoken in north-eastern Turkey has been identified by researchers as a “linguistic goldmine” because of its startling closeness to previous forms of the Greek language.

Fieldwork examining Romeyka, a little-studied form of Greek still spoken in the area around Trabzon, on Turkey’s Black Sea coast, has revealed a number of features that it shares with the Koine (or common) Greek of Hellenistic and Roman times.

For linguists, the discovery presents a rare opportunity to map out the features not just of another living language, but of a dialect closer than anything else still living to that spoken at the height of Greek influence across Asia Minor, 2,000 years ago.

The link was (re)discovered by Dr. Ioanna Sitaridou, a lecturer in Romance Philology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow and Director of Studies in Linguistics at Queens’ College, Cambridge. Her initial findings are reported in the University’s research magazine, Research Horizons, and a short film about her research is also being released on the University’s YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/cambridgeuniversity) today.

“Although Romeyka can hardly be described as anything but a Modern Greek dialect, it preserves an impressive number of grammatical traits that add an Ancient Greek flavour to the dialect’s structure – traits that have been completely lost from other Modern Greek varieties,” Dr. Sitaridou said. “What these people are speaking is a variety of Greek far more archaic than other forms of Greek spoken today.”

Until medieval times, the Black Sea lay at the heart of the Greek-speaking world. It was colonised by the Greeks in the 8th and 7th centuries BC and immortalised in Greek mythology.

Despite millennia of change in the surrounding area, people in the isolated region still speak the language. One reason is that Romeyka speakers are devout Muslims, and were therefore exempt from the large-scale population exchange between Greece and Turkey that took place under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.

Using religion as a defining criterion to resettle Christians in Greece and Muslims in Turkey, almost two million people were forced to move. The result was an obligatory exodus of all Christian Greek-speakers from north-eastern Turkey, leaving the speakers of Romeyka relatively isolated from both Turkish (albeit clearly not the case for the younger generations), but also sealed off from Pontic Greek spoken by the resettled Christians in Greece and elsewhere in the world.

Dr. Sitaridou, whose great-grandparents were from the region, is now reporting the results of the first phase of a project to uncover the secrets of this little-studied dialect.

She first became aware that Romeyka might be of special importance after Prof. Peter Mackridge, who is Emeritus Professor of Modern Greek at the University of Oxford and has carried out pioneering research since the 1980s, signalled to her that her work on Romance infinitives may have a parallel in Romeyka. Astonishingly enough, Romeyka had retained the infinitive – the basic, uninflected form of the verb. This was part of Ancient Greek, but has disappeared from the medieval and modern language. All the more astonishing, Romeyka has developed some other quirky infinitival constructions that have never been observed before – only in the Romance languages are there parallel constructions.

Her work involves undertaking field trips to villages in Pontus, often isolated enclaves where Romeyka is spoken, and mapping the grammatical structure and variation in use. Information is gathered using audio and video recordings of the villagers telling stories, as well as through specially-structured questionnaires using state-of-the-art modern linguistic theory.

Ultimately, the work seeks to explain how Pontic Greek evolved. “We know that Greek has been continuously spoken in Pontus since ancient times and can surmise that its geographic isolation from the rest of the Greek-speaking world is an important factor in why the language is as it is,” said Dr. Sitaridou, recipient of a Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellowship in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University (Spring 2011).

“What we don’t yet know is whether Romeyka emerged in exactly the same way as other Greek dialects, but later developed its own unique characteristics which just happen to resemble archaic Greek. On the other hand, it may have developed from an earlier version of Greek that was different to the rest of the Greek dialects, which in turn explains the archaic features.”

Her latest report comes with a warning: Repeated waves of emigration from Trabzon, coupled with the influence of the dominant Turkish-speaking majority, have left the dialect vulnerable to extinction. UNESCO has already designated Pontic Greek as “definitely endangered”.

“With as few as 5,000 speakers left in the area, before long Romeyka could be more of a heritage language than a living vernacular,” Dr. Sitaridou added. “With its demise would go an unparalleled opportunity to unlock how the Greek language has evolved.”

Source: University of Cambridge.

 

Google Translate and the Struggle for Accurate Machine Translations

Using a pioneering approach to machine translation (MT), search behemoth Google now provides translations from 52 languages through its Google Translate service. Google has capitalized on its access to unfathomable amounts of data, largely in the form of transcripts from the proceedings at the United Nations, which have been rendered into some 23 languages by professional human translators. Google Translate trawls this invaluable source of data, along with text from the Google Books scanning project and additional Internet resources, for likely translation matches. Internet users access the tool tens of millions of times each day to translate information as they surf the web.

While Google Translate has made impressive strides in our ability to understand and communicate with the rest of the world, what do the future prospects look like for the service and other machine translation programs? According to the leader of Google’s machine translation team, Franz Och, “This technology can make the language barrier go away.” Other linguistics experts contend that MT will strengthen linguistic diversity by freeing the world from the need to focus on dominant languages such as English. Ironically, one potential consequence of the widespread use of tools like Google Translate is decreased incentive for individuals to learn English and/or become multilingual.

Though some experts claim that Google Translate’s results will better with time, researchers and computer scientists working on the project note that the system is unlikely to dramatically improve with the addition of more data. “We are now at this limit where there isn’t that much more data in the world that we can use,” notes Andreas Zollmann, a Google Translate team member, “so now it is much more important again to add on different approaches and rules-based models.”

Of course, detractors state that regardless of the technological advances made, machine translation will never learn to pick up on the cultural undertones and subtleties at play in language. Jokes, idioms and wordplay are largely lost on Google Translate, which fails to capture the “flavor” of the text. According to author Douglas Hofstadter, “There is no attempt at creating understanding, and therefore Google Translate is doomed to the same kind of failure forever.”

Should American Students Learn Spanish or Chinese?

With China on track to secure a position as a leading economic force in the 21st century, schools across the United States are beginning to offer Mandarin Chinese to prepare American students to deal with the Asian powerhouse. While there’s little doubt that fluency in Chinese will provide a competitive edge in the future, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof argues that, first and foremost, American children should be studying Spanish.

He notes that the “everyday presence” of the Spanish language in the U.S. as well as the country’s increasing economic integration with Latin America makes learning Spanish an imperative. Those with Spanish skills will be able to capitalize on business opportunities in the region, which will continue to see growth in the coming years as economies in places such as Southern Europe stagnate under the weight of the enduring financial crisis. In addition, Spanish is far easier for children to learn than Chinese, and students can attain a level of proficiency in Spanish by the time they graduate from high school that would be impossible with the more complicated Mandarin.

The Spanish Language in Brazil

The popularity of Spanish as a foreign language continues to grow in Brazil, the only Portuguese-speaking nation on a continent dominated by Spanish. Brazil shares a border with seven Spanish-speaking countries, and it conducts a substantial amount of trade with countries where Spanish is spoken (1/4 of exports and 1/5 of imports).

A significant number of non-Brazilian Spanish speakers, estimated at about 1 million people, call the nation home, mostly as the result of immigration from surrounding countries. Sephardic Jews – who speak both Ladino and Spanish – settled in Brazil and now compose a small portion of the country’s Spanish-speaking peoples.

With an eye toward more fully integrating Brazil with its Spanish-speaking neighbors and partners in the South American trade bloc Mercosur, the Brazilian Congress passed an education bill in 2005 requiring all secondary schools to offer Spanish as a second language. This legislation spurred an increase in resources dedicated to Spanish, and the number of Brazilian students studying español has increased from one million to five million in a period of just five years. A recent agreement between Spain’s Cervantes Institute, an organization devoted to promoting the Spanish language worldwide, and the Brazilian Ministry of Education provides for the training of 26,000 Spanish teachers to manage the increased demand sparked by the 2005 bill.