Lost in tranlsation sort of

Neither Aviva nor I have fluency in Spanish, other than faking it in the Spanish edition of our book, so we rely upon interpreters when we are invited to present in Spanish speaking communities. We are wonderfully fortunate to have an interpreter on our team her in The DC who once worked at the US State Department. Joanna was a big help to us when Aviva and I were interviewed for Caras Magazine last year; she translated the journalist's questions into English and translated our answers to Spanish making the experience easy for everyone involved with the interview.

But wasn't always simple. Oh no. Not at all. Being a first book, we hadn't considered being contacted by foreign press and how we would deal with it. I'm confident we are not the only authors who came across an online translator and initially tried to use it...unsuccessfully.

See, the way it works is you plug in a website and it will translate that web page, or selected content, for you in seconds. Prior to meeting Joanna, we read articles or blog posts written in various languages about our work and ran them thru the site. We discovered that while the translation was quick, it wasn't always an exact match. Even though we no longer need to do it this way,occasionally we do just for fun. Sometimes we can figure out what is being conveyed. Other times? Not so much.

Here are is an example of two blogs written in Spanish. They are posts about our books, but some of it got, well, lost in translation, sort of...

Babel Fish offered this doozy: Remember you the scent of the kitchen that time that did its first queque, or what felt the first time that left to walk in bicycle in family?

and

This blog which gave Aviva the name "Intensifies Pflock" because Avivar is a verb in Spanish and one of it's inflected forms is "Aviva."

Cross-posted at DC Metro Moms Blog