Because Spanish and English are two different languages with a myriad of histories, cultures, and ways of conceptualizing the world, they use different rhetorical strategies to form ideas and construct sentences. These strategies and their results in written discourse—which, after all, is the most pertinent for the translator—can be not only interesting but entertaining in their own right.
Any time spent dwelling on the comparative gems of the Spanish and English languages is time well spent; anyone who is lucky enough to be translating between these two languages is like a manic switchboard operator consumed by their own manual dexterity and the demands of so many flashing lights. The difference with translation, of course, is that overstimulation is never really an issue.
The range of syntactic possibilities in Spanish alone, to take one aspect, affords the language an immense amount of finesse when it comes to reordering elements for the purposes of emphasis or rhetoric. Take, for example, the following Spanish sentences: these would have no effective literal translation into English, which has to resort to other strategies to make up for its syntactic limitations.
If all these sentences convey the same essential meaning, which one would be the best in an into-Spanish translation, for instance? That all depends on the context, the desired emphasis, the nature of the writer’s intent. And maybe even the elbow grease of the translator.
Here is the normal order of a subject, a verb, and an object (s., v., and o. respectively), common to both English and Spanish:
Enrique leyó el libro = Henry (s.) read (v.) the book (o.)
But in Spanish, there is also the option of inverting the subject and the verb for rhetorical reasons, which would lead us to the following:
Leyó Enrique el libro = Read (v.) Henry (s.) the book (o.)
A writer of Spanish can also postpone the subject to the end of the sentence, and for the same reasons:
Leyó el libro Enrique = Read (v.) the book (o.) Henry (s.)
In Spanish you can also move the object to the beginning, repeating it later with a pronoun to emphasize both object (first) and subject (last):
El libro lo leyó Enrique = The book (o.) it (o. pronoun) read (v.) Henry (s.)
There is also the cleft sentence, whereby important information is moved to a separate clause to give it greater emphasis. In this case, the syntax is similar in the two languages:
Fue Enrique el que leyó el libro = It (s.) was Henry who read (v.) the book (o.)
Translators are often grateful for the complexities of language because they afford us a creative latitude, itself the bulwark against machine translation and an era in which human translation is often oversimplified or misunderstood.
It should be said and said again: translating is not just replacing words in one language with those in another; it is transmitting all the meaning of a coherent message. That means using the very human ability to use a vast tool box that includes emotion and inference to disentangle and reconstruct the often intricate and multi-level complexity of that message—whether that be a word, a sentence, a paragraph, or an entire document.
As a result, human translation ultimately means choosing from a range of possible translations the one that is subjectively the best in a specific context. And that is something that machine translation and AI, which can only ever consider one option at any given time, are astoundingly ill-equipped to undertake.
