Once I got into a steady rhythm of speaking Spanish everyday in Granada, sometimes my English would come out muddled. Since Spanish has a much smaller vocabulary than English, many times the words that stuck in its lexicon happen to be cognates of English’s fancier word bank. This means that at times I sounded like a very classy Brit when I would directly translate back from Spanish into English. “I’m enchanted to meet you,” “Would you like to take a coffee on the terrace?” “I’m going to pass a small while reading now,” or, “I’m absolutely enamored of this Zara top.”
I always took this as a great sign—my foreign language was conquering my native one!—but sometimes my backwards translations would have consequences, like when I exclaimed to my friend Luc one day, “Professor Antonio just assigned us a 20-page-paper due in a week. He molests me so much sometimes!”
About The Author
Jenny
Jenny Marshall studied Language, Culture, and Society at the University of California Santa Barbara, and now teaches English in Spain. Here she writes about the intersection of language and culture, and lives a life translated by travel.
