In a letter to the editor in our local paper, a woman was absolutely incensed by this wording on a sticker that the city sent for her to put on her curbside recycling bin:
Removiendo Botellas y latas es robando
It is meant to say, I believe, “removing bottles and cans is stealing.” The letter writer said that it is “almost incomprehensible” and “full of errors.” I don’t speak Spanish, but I’ve seen so many grammatical errors on “semi-official” things in Irish (not to mention more than my fair share of “Google translate” garbage), I find myself curious…is it as bad as the letter writer says?
Well growing up in Urban Florida, you catch on to Spanish easily, and I took Spanish for 4 years in high school. Spanish is sort of a backwards language to English. This phrase isn’t too horrible, but it is incorrect. They are missing a lot of words like “se” and “la”. I hope that helps a little.
Should probably be “Remover botellas y latas es robar.”
Not sure, but I know that putting the verbs in gerund form is incorrect.
As it stands, it comes out something like “Removed bottles and cans is stolen.”
And to be completely picky, it should probably be “o” (or) not “y” (and) because as is suggests that you must remove both bottles and cans in order to be guilty of stealing.
Come to think of it, it should be “quitar” not “remover.”
Remover usually means something like “to stir” in cooking. So, I correct my original bad translation. The notice suggests that stirred bottles and cans are stolen. (Perhaps it’s best if your recyclables don’t look too randomly distributed, or someone might accuse you of stirring them.)
It’s a literal word-for-word, morpheme-for-morpheme translation of the English, and it’s simply ungrammatical non-Spanish. It sounds like what my mom calls pocho. It uses the progressive form of the verbs remover and robar as gerunds (nominalized verbs) - and there are no noun gerunds in Spanish. There’s the nominal use of the infinitive, something like “remover X es robar”, but that doesn’t sound right either.
Remover is fine as the verb, meaning remove. Sacar or robar would be better.
I’d simply say something like: Robar latas y botellas es un crímen = Theft of bottles and cans is a crime.
Reminds me of a joke in our household. When we’re frustrated with something, we shout “Yo doy arriba!”
A few years ago, my company decided to order some promotional T-shirts to give away with our product. The front of the shirt was to be a multilingual parallel text of the English expression “What’s up?” in English, Spanish, French, German, etc. So “¿Qué hay de nuevo?”, “Quoi de neuf ?”, “Was ist neues?” etc.
Naturally, the marketing guys ordered a gross of shirts before checking with the Director of Linguistics (er, me). When they finally sent me one, the Spanish read: “Qué está arriba?” I kid you not.
Needless to say, 144 employees ended up with free T-shirts …
We see that quite a lot with Irish. For a long time it was people pulling words out of dictionary and plugging them into English syntax (sometimes even going so far as to add English endings, such as “s,” “'s” and “ing”!). Now it’s Google “translate” doing essentially the same thing (and plugging in English words where it doesn’t know the Irish). For example, right now, if you plug in “removing bottles and cans is stealing” and ask for an English-Irish translation, you get:
bhaint buidéil agus cannaí is stealing
The Irish part comes out to "Bottles and cans extracted (past tense) [is stealing]
I’m always surprised, on the IGTF, at how people don’t realize that idioms don’t translate directly between languages. If asked to translate “what’s up” to Irish, I’d probably use something like “aon scéal?” (“any tale/story?”)…definitely not “cad é atá thuas?” (literally “what is up?”)
This isn’t particularly related, but I had to tell
someone. I saw a bumper sticker on a car the
other day which mimicked the old Virginia State motto, except it said “Guster is for lovers”.
I liked it.
I think it’s supposed to be “gustar” and it’s just the Spanish verb used to describe whether something is pleasing or not. (Whether you like something or not, it’s just that in English the liker is the subject and the liked thing the object–opposite in Spanish.)
So, it’s a play on the slogan “Virginia is for Lovers,” but it’s stating that the word “gustar” is for people who want to say they love something.
I think. Maybe guster signifies something else, and I’m missing it.
