¡Comer Con Gusto!
I was stuck in traffic and saw an ad for the new "Angus" hamburgers at McDonald's. (I think they may be testing them regionally, so you may not have heard of them.) I had plenty of time to look it over.
What intrigued me was how the English was so much shorter than the Spanish. Is this normal? Is it a coincidence? Was the translator just better at one of the languages? Do Latino consumers demand more adjectives?
Here, to the best of my memory (I don't know Spanish) is the ad copy:
"Pure Angus beef on a toasted baker's style roll."
"Grandes y suculentas hamburgeusas hechas con pura carne Angus, en un papecillo tostado estilo panaderia."
posted by LAGuy @ 2:10 AM
1 Comments:
I would bet that American consumers demand fewer adjectives.
Your "Grandes y suculentas" was simply omitted in the English, or was added in the Spanish. It's not really a question of translation per se.
This makes me think of the modern English translation of the Catholic Mass, which similarly drops adjectives. For example, one of the lines in Latin is Vere dignum et iustum est, aequum et salutare, nos tibi, sancte Pater, semper et ubique gratias agere. Literally, this translates as "Truly, holy Father, it is proper and just, fair and salvific, for us to always and everywhere give you thanks." But the English translation actually says "Father, it is our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere, to give you thanks." The literal translation is twenty words long, but the translation used in the English mass is fifteen words, because the translators apparently wanted it to sound less "flowery".
Could this be because Americans have become partially immune to flowery advertisements?
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