Spanglish is a verbal free-will psychological combination of the English-Spanish languages in colloquial and formal verbal practice, that occurs in the mind of characters and people. Whether it be a conversation on the subway, to lectures in universities, it can evolve spontaneously as a social and cultural phenomenon, due to economic and psico-politico-social reasons. Languages are scientific codes and ciphers that can be verified.
Is the verbal phenomenon friend or foe? As writer, it is viewed bilaterally: the evolution of this “dialectic-dialect”, as debate can deliver, creates phrases and picturesque vocabularies, in the global scenario of linguistics; as it has occurred with computer terminology and translation, as in the words reset in english or resetear, in spanish, (to reboot your computer), and other pragmatic-utilitarian examples. Or, like translators who translate or pronounce thank you in spanish as sénkiu.
The phenomenon moves like an information cloud between the two cultures from cosmopolitan Los Angeles, U.S.A. with its hispanic crowd, to Miami or latinamerican cities where technology, and globalization, with its arrays of change, reaches ground in a multicultural american, european, afro, asian, psychological terrains. Caracas, in Venezuela, or Buenos Aires in Argentina, have the essence and recipes for verbal chameleonic transformation in the languages. Just like Brazilian bossa nova music enriched the mainstream of American Jazz. With the advent of the wonderful gleam of globalization, neomarketing, social media, technical writing, and literatures, to translations and inventions, in variegated versions, written and oral translation, creates a gigantic cornucopia of sounds, onomatopaeic to nominal forms. This can be a dilemma, a syndrome, or indeed, a blessing.
When translating, non-fully bilingual translators fall into the maelstrom or spiral of spanglish, that some linguists have denominated as detrimental to both languages, meaning, that some hispanics, or spanish speakers, in english speaking countries, and natives whose spanish is their second language, do not reach proficiency in any of the two languages. They speak bad Spanish and bad English, if you might say, at the same time. Even child nourishment and genetic aspects of social behaviour, are intermingled in this dilemma. If a child is badly nourished when young, before birth, he can develop speech anomalias, intelligence handicaps that affect future in schools and jobs, affecting economies, societies in the realm of communication, art, etc.
A translator might say in spanish: “What is your name?, translate it on the street or, to commit the sin of doing it in formal translation, and say: “¿Cúal es tú name? (spanglish). Well, it may seem funny, some people do not care, professionally it makes a difference. Preeminently in legal translating, you can not give yourself the intimate luxury of using spanglish, unless it may be a multicultural novel, or innovation: I heard of a boy whose name was “Michael Jackson Martínez”.
When a translator makes a mistake, people lose money, time and intellectual richness, you lose communication, the opportunity to translate, deliver a sentence or expression, in the proper form and content, to guarantee the fluent and trafficked practice of life. And, there, right there, in the use of the word traffic, is an example of spanglish when writing in thinking about the word traficado in spanish psychologically. What do you think, dear reader?
Written by Carlos Mijares Poyer, writer, poet, journalist, translator and marketing professional from Guilford College and Pine Crest School cmijarespoyer@gmail.com
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