Martín Vukovic
Crossing borders
Since I am from Argentina, my first language is Spanish.
I was lucky to have the chance to study English in an institute for a couple of years when I was young, which gave me some decent foundation. But mostly thanks to different kinds of media, I was able to improve my overall knowledge of the language, but also to learn a lot of references, slang and other more uncommon words and phrases that might be harder to grasp for someone with a more basic knowledge.
My English is far from perfect, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes, when talking with friends and colleagues, I find myself way ahead in my familiarity with general and popular culture of the English-speaking world.
I love to be able to read some books in their original language. There have been a couple of times when I first read a translated version and then the original, and I was horrified by the difference. The story might have been the same, but the ambiance, the voice of the narrator, the characters’ personalities, the descriptions of places and internal monologues, it all felt very different.
The same goes for dubbing. Most of the time the dubbing of movies, TV shows and even videogames is simply atrocious. Part of the problem is that in Argentina we have a dialect that has some pretty significant differences from others in the rest of Latin America. Of course that difference also applies to the “original” version of Spanish, Castilian Spanish, the one from Spain.
For us, most of the dubbing comes from outside of Argentina, which means that when we watch something dubbed, we are listening to people speak in a way that’s quite different from how we normally speak. There are some local dubbings, but it’s pretty rare, and I don’t think they are any better.
Some dubbings are so bad, that you can tell they are doing literal translations of words or phrases that just don’t make any sense. And the worst part is that some of those words and expressions stuck, and they are now part of our regular vocabulary.
Languages create a great divide between people. We have some tricks to transfer some things between them, but a lot is altered or lost in the process.
Sometimes I think about a lot of movies, TV shows or videogames that my daughter would love, but which are only available in English, and she’s still a bit young to be able to read subtitles quickly enough.
Each language lives inside its own bubble, and yes, some things can permeate between them but each has its own ideas, trends, pop culture, memes, communities. They have different identities.
Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of activity in the Indieweb movement, mostly in the English-speaking space, specially on Bear Blog, where communities are starting to form around writing blog posts, submitting challenges to other bloggers, writing cues to help others write, and all sorts of human interactions that I would miss if I couldn’t read and write in English.
Being able to participate in that dialogue opens many doors and offers many gifts to someone like me, who is always looking for more to discover and explore.
I’ve been thinking about creating a new blog exclusively to write in English, since I think mixing both languages in the same blog is a little messy. Putting myself in the shoes of someone reading a blog that switches randomly between languages that I don’t understand, I would find it a bit annoying.
My current blog is built in a very hands-on way, and creating a new post is a slow and laborious process (it’s a feature), but I don’t think I want that extra burden in my English blog. I think language is already enough of a barrier without adding another layer.
Maybe I’ll host my own blogging engine… why not?
I’ll keep you posted!
Thanks for reading.
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