Too literal

Do you know what a calco is? In Spanish, it means a carbon copy or a direct translation. It’s what happens when you take a phrase in English and translate it word for word into Spanish. Sometimes that works perfectly well, but more often it ends up sounding slightly odd to a Spanish ear—just as it does when the same thing happens the other way round.

One I always forget is when, in a shop, someone asks if I need help and I reply with the direct translation of “I’m fine, thanks”. Perfectly acceptable in English, but slightly puzzling for the salesperson in El Corte Inglés, who may wonder why I’ve suddenly decided to comment on my state of health. Another common example is saying “I can’t swim”, at which point the Spaniard you’re with might start wondering why they’d never noticed your prosthetic leg or the tiny breathing apparatus you’ve been discreetly carrying around. If, instead, you said you didn’t know how to swim, it would make perfect sense. And one I hear all the time is “Is it possible to…?”, which then trails off because what follows is often tricky for Britons with limited Spanish, as it requires the dreaded subjunctive.

I asked my AI speaking partner to flag up when I was using phrases that were essentially calcos. I expected it to be an occasional thing; instead, the little sod was spotting three examples in a five-line stretch. To be fair, they weren’t all that bad—or at least I don’t think they were. I’d said something like “I went silent”, and it suggested “I remained silent”, while “many times the podcasts were delayed” worked better as “many times the podcasts were released late”. Even so, given the number of books I’ve read in Spanish and the hours of radio I’ve listened to, I had hoped it might have been slightly better.