Accuracy & acceptability

Gosh. Let me give you chocolates and flowers and tickets to the opera and all the pretty things for I have been a very bad correspondent. And what I really want is for you to take me back and read my posts, but with neither promises nor hope for change. For I may be so again and there is way of no knowing.

 . . . 

Righto then. So what I actually wanted to say is that in the year and a half I've been here, I've had the very great privilege of learning from men who would never have found their way down to lil' ol' Tasmania (including Australia's very own Peter Jensen!), thanks to various conferences and intensives put on by Fundación Generación and the CEP. It's also been great Spanish practice, observing what the Chilean translators do with different English expressions and words. And here's something I've noticed time and time again... No matter the country (we've had speakers from England, the US, and Australia), in English, we tend to be fairly blunt about negative things. We just go right on and say thing x is "bad", "difficult", "misguided". But there must be an internal balking at such unwielding assessment in the Chilean mind because I always hear "pretty bad", "rather difficult", "it could be said that it is misguided".

It's quite the opposite when it comes to positive conclusions. The English speaker's enthusiasm is chastened - "good", "enjoyable", "understandable". But the Spanish-speaking translators seem unable to restrict themselves to such faint praise - it's all "excellent", "really fun", "very easy to understand".

This makes a lot of sense to me. To put it positively, when it comes to the unpleasant things in life, English speakers are more realistic and honest, while Spanish speakers (or Chileans at least, but I suspect it's more broad than that) are keen to be careful and not cause any unnecessary offence. I'm not sure what to make of the English speaker's take on life's good things ('cos mine's an unusually exuberant style), but perhaps it is equally accurate, whereas the Spanish speaker latches onto anything good and by amplifying it, celebrates it!