Translating and mistranslating a Spanish hotel registration form - lost in translation

 

I kept my registration form from a hotel in Spain, Hotel Zenit Coruna, and used it to revise my Spanish vocabulary. I experienced a few surprises, words I had mis-translated in my mind,

1 Datos del viajero looked like dates of the trip. It was not. It was details of the traveller.

2 Segundo apellido was not second name of middle name, meaning second given name. It was second surname or family name. Spanards use their mother's maiden name or family name as a middle name. 

3 Direccion is not directions but address.

4 Fecha is not facts but dates.

5 Firma del viajero is not confirmation of the trip/journey/stay but signature of the traveller. 

Spanish - English

datos - data/ 

detalles - details

direccion - address

direcciones - direcions

fechas - dates

segundo apellido - second surname

viaje - journey

viajero - traveller

https://translate.google.com/

English - Spanish

address - dreccion

data - datos

dates - fechas

details - detalles

directions- direcciones

journey - viaje

Useful Websites

Trasnslate google

https://translate.google.com/

 

Second set of Portuguese words - learn 15 easy to remember words

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I can't stop learning Portuguese and Spanish.

English - Portuguese

taxi - taxi
hotel- hotel
bank - banco
port - puerto
blue - azul - (like azure which is a bright blue)

name - nome
first name - primeiro nome (like primary school)
family name/surname - sobrenome
table - mesa
room - quarto (like living quarters)

one - um (like French un and English one - remember: How many? Um - one.)
two - dois (like two dice)
three - três (tr as in triple, tricycle, trio; think of three trespassers)
four - quatro (like quadrangle in English and quarter and quatre in French)
ten - dez (sounds a bit like decimal)

Useful Websites
Languages
translate google
duolingo
duolingo.com

https://www.visitbrasil.com/key-information/language.html
memrise
memrise.com
https://www.mezzoguild.com/portuguese-and-brazilian/

Travel
https://www.visitportugal.com/en
https://www.visitbrasil.com/

About the Author
Angela Lansbury is a travel writer and photographer, speaker, author, and teacher of languages.
Latest book: An ebook  Improve Your English. Several books by different authors have that title. Make sure to add the name Angela Lansbury.
I have written a post about the Spanish restaurant in Melaka, called Salud which means cheers.
Please share links to your favourite pages.
Update
Contact Angela Lansbury by attending Braddell Heights Advanced Toastmasters Club online.

Name Days And Names Worldwide

Problem
How do you remember people's names?

Answer
1 Keep repeating the name.
2 Discuss the meaning of their name, or why they were given that name. Some names are related to name days.

Story
How did I get my names? I was given my first name by my grandmother (my maternal grandmother - my mother's mother). My second name was chosen by my mother. The surname came from my father.

My surname is Lansbury. That's on a deed poll for change of name. The original name was from Ukraine. After WWII my parents wanted to change the name to something which sounded more English. Easy to pronounce and patriotic.

I thought that my parents changed the surname before I was born. After my parents both died I opened a deed box and discovered that my name was changed when I was a toddler.

The name of the new surname copied the initial letter of the original name. In my family we also kept the initial letters of our first names over three generations. Albert-Angela-Anthony. It makes it easy to have one set of name tapes, or handwritten labels, or initials, especially if you borrow each other's hats, gloves, bags, suitcases and umbrellas.

I could celebrate my name day, for Angela, on the English day, which is the same as the day in German and Austria, but other countries have more dates!

Tip
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_day
Wikipedia covers 22 countries:
Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romanis, Russia, Scandinavia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Hispanien America, Sweden, Ukraine.
http://www.happynameday.com/country.php
(Name days for these 18 countries: Austrian, Bulgarian, Czech, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish. The site sells greeting cards and ecards.

Author
Angela Lansbury

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author, speaker, teacher of languages.
Please follow my posts and share. More on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube. Books by Angela Lansbury on Amazon.com and Lulu.com

Secrets of Names in the Czech Republic Revealed: what would your first name and surname be?

I am learning German and Italian on a daily basis on Duolingo and I am registered to be notified when several other languages start. The Czech language is 98% ready so I keep looking to see when it will start. Duo lingo has a straight forward easy to understand introduction to each language and its pronunciation and sentence structure on the first page of the course.

Meanwhile I thought I'd have a little look at Wikipedia. What most surprised me was the names. Until recently it was usual to be given a prescribed first name, named after the Roman Catholic Saint from the Roman Catholic Calendar on whose day you were born.

Therefore, if a traditional older person in Prague told you their name, and it was a saint's name, you would automatically know their birthdate, at least the day and month, not their age. You would be able to wish them happy birthday and send them a birthday greeting.

But the Czech language also has some other peculiarities. My surname would change. Female surnames have different endings to masculine names.

Problem
How would I introduce myself?

Answer
Here's the solution, check the popular names and family names in Wikipedia.

You can see that Alicia Markova, if she had come from Prague, would be the daughter of a man whose surname was Mark. Her brother's surname would be Mark. Her mother's surname would be Markova.

Story
When I visited St Albans I went into the cathedral which was free to visit and had an exhibition on the history of the cathedral and city. I read a medieval document which was very hard to understand because it concerned two characters, both called John, involved in a conflict. Both men had their names spelled differently, changing throughout the document. This made the events described very hard to follow.

For example, "John said that Jon owed him money but Jonn also said that John had repaid half the money but John denied this because Jon had said that Jonn ..."

The same change of spelling applied to all the other words. "We noe that hee hadd sed know but now that the judge has said that no dose not meen know ..."

I then realised the advantage of fixed spelling.

I am now very interested in how languages and names very and what they imply and tell us.

Tip
Even if you can't learn the language, you can have an interesting conversation with somebody from Prague or the Czech Republic about their name and birthday and the names of members of the family and friends and colleagues.

Here are some of the most interesting parts of the Wikipedia article:
"During the Communist era, parents needed a special permission form to give a child a name that did not have a name day on the Czech calendar. Since the Velvet revolution in 1989, parents have had the right to give their child any name they wish, provided it is used somewhere in the world and is not insulting or demeaning. However, the common practice of last years is that most birth-record offices look for the name in the book "Jak se bude vaše dítě jmenovat?" (What is your child going to be called?),[1] which is a semi-official list of "allowed" names. If the name is not found there, authorities are extremely unwilling to register the child's name.[2]

"Czech parents remain somewhat conservative in their choices of baby names. In January 2004, the most popular boy's names were Jan (John), Jakub (Jacob or James) and Tomáš (Thomas). The most popular girl's names were Tereza (Theresa), Kateřina (Katherine) and Eliška (Liz or Elise). Throughout all the nine years, the name Tereza is ruling among girls born in January every year.


"What is not shared with English but is similar to North American native languages is the extremely colorful nature of some Czech surnames, such as Brzobohatý (Soon to be rich), Volopich (Pricking an ox), Urvinitka (Tear a string), Rádsetoulal (Liked wandering around), Stojaspal (Slept standing), Vítámvás (I welcome you), Tenkrát (Back in those days), Skovajsa (Hide yourself!), Nebojsa (Don't be afraid!), Skočdopole (Jump in a field!), Vozihnoj (Driving with manure), Osolsobě (Salt for yourself!), Ventluka (Knocking outward), Rádsetoulal (Usurped in vain), Nejezchleb (Don't eat bread!), Potměšil (He sewed in the dark), Přecechtěl (He wanted anyway), Drahokoupil (He bought costly), Nepovím (Won't tell) or Blabla.

Female surnames[edit]
As in English-speaking countries, Czech females traditionally receive their father's surname at birth and take their husband's name when they marry. However, the names are not exactly the same; the endings differ to fit into the Czech language's systems of gender adjectives. For example, the tennis players Cyril Suk and Helena Suková are brother and sister; Suková is the feminine form of Suk. In fact, Czech female surnames are almost always feminine adjectives. There are several ways of forming them, depending on their male counterpart:

If the male surname is a masculine adjective (ending in -ý), the female surname is simply the feminine equivalent. Thus, a girl whose father's surname is Novotný would have the surname Novotná .
If the male surname is a noun, the female surname takes the suffix -ová, making it a feminine adjective:
Novák becomes Nováková


So Kim Novak is Kim Newman. But when she visits Prague she would be called Kim Novákova. (I keep adding the accent on the second a in the surname but the system keeps removing it.)

"-ová is still added, even when speaking of foreigners ("Angela Merkelová"). Because gender-marked suffixes are inherited in the Czech grammar and also because the gender of a person could be told straight from the surname regardless of the context, Czechs tend to add a feminine suffix to the surnames of Czech as well as foreign women surnames. Thus, e.g. American first lady Michelle Obama is referred to as Michelle Obamová in the Czech press."

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author, speaker, teacher of languages.
Please follow my posts and share. More on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube. Books by Angela Lansbury on Amazon.com and Lulu.com