English Translation:
Cat: Do you have a cat?
Girl: No.
Cat: Now you have one!
Girl: And that’s how I got a cat.
The translation is precise, but for some reason it doesn’t carry the same degree of humor. I think it may have to do with the way Spanish handles the indefinite article “a cat.”
Edit: ok, that might be part of it, but there’s also the way he tells her that she now has a cat. The word-for-word translation differs slightly in meaning from the figurative translation. There’s something that’s lost, maybe a degree of finality?
I think “You do now.” probably works better than “Now you have one!” It feels more threatening.
(Disclaimer: I’m a native speaker or neither English nor Spanish.)
one of my friends loves to say “oh my gatos!” instead of “oh my god”
and when you hear that coming from this 6’2 tatoo’d and dreadlocked brute, it always makes me giggle
one of my friends loves to say “oh my gatos!” instead of “oh my god”
Recently learned that this is called a minced oath.
I’m Spaniard and it sounds weird in Spanish, so much that I thought it was some auto translation bot. The humor is still there and it’s easy to get eve it is sounds weird.
Alright, now I’m curious. I was responding from the perspective of an English speaker who reads and understands Spanish.
What do you find strange in the Spanish version? How would you express these lines more naturally?
“un gato”, it’s missing the word “a” in “a cat”, which makes it sound wrong and funnier in spanish than if it’d be written well
I know just enough Spanish to read the whole joke before reading the translation. I agree, going for fewer shorter words makes it concise and funnier.
I make the same point to weaboos that insist on literal translation from Japanese. Sometimes just rewriting a phrase is a better option to carry the literary quality.
I miss Spanish language memes on Lemmy. I really wish the one mayor Spanish language server didn’t disappear overnight with no major explanation.
Yeah… I knew something was missing… That was really cool to see with my Spanish learning whenever I understood one.
There was a server, mujico.org that just disappeared, suddenly at the beginning of this year. I don’t know why, but I would read news and memes there. I’ve tried to Google about it. I don’t know who ran it, but it was a Mexican server. It was the largest Spanish language community I found on Lemmy and I desperately want a replacement.
Look like they’re back: https://mujico.org/post/3614
(a lot of slang there I don’t understand, though…)
I was a tripping a lil on mushrooms and my roomate was like "hey theres a cute stray hanging out on our porch. And now I have a cat
I am learning spanish for a month . Now, I can fucking understand this comic without translation OMG.
The Cat Distribution System at work