Bilinguism

Photo courtesy of Univisión

I am so glad I didn't go to Miami for this :

Reporters who didn't speak Spanish were already anxious about the translation devices that didn't quite fit in our ears. (Porque soy de California, yo hablo un poquito Espanol.)

But 90 seconds before the forum began tonight, the Media Room had no sound - not in Spanish, English or French. Nada.

Spanish- and English-speaking reporters in the room erupted in a panic, sending University of Miami staff scrambling to try and fix the feed. What most reporters heard for the first 16 minutes of the debate was static - both from the closed television feed and from the translation device.

Even Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) seemed to have trouble, yanking the earpiece from his ear mid-way through his answer to a question on Iraq.

Notwithstanding the awe inspiring set and the hard hitting tonality of the questioning, I don't think that Univision did anything groundbreaking. On the contrary, by not allowing Dodd and Richardson to respond in Spanish, they pandered to the Democrats who still treat latinos as a political ghetto from where to get voting servants to work for their "mainstream" agendas.

Richardson complained, and with good reason, about not being able to speak in Spanish. Hillary, Obama, Edwards, they need to get over it. Spanish is the official second language of the United States, thanks in part to that little colony nobody ever mentions in these forums anyway, Puerto Rico. If they couldn't deal with it, then their muscling in the “English-only” requirement for the forum should be used against them at the voting booth.

Ok, so we are obsessed with le headbutt.

My son has not stopped talking about it. His father is a man with no interest in sports. So my poor son has been stopping men, asking them if they saw the final game, if they saw Zidane and ask them why the hell did he do that.

It's like he's trolling for sports talk.

He's upset. He can't believe the captain, Le Capitain!, threw the World Cup away with a headbutt. He doesn't understand that maybe France was going to lose anyway but seeing France lose like that has him reeeeaaallly upset. This from the child who cried when both Brazil and Portugal lost to the frenchies.

So, after hearing him go to sleep asking yet again, "WHY DID ZIDANE DO THAT!" and with his baby brother yapping in the background, "Because he's a freaking idiot", I decided to get a clip of the cabezazo.

What I have found is a mini-treasure trove of linguistic soccer clusterfucking that proves that fútbol is not only biggest sport in the world, it is the only real world sport.

You are forewarned : The full post is BANDWIDTH SUCKING HEAVY.

or should I say, a multilingual pirate lover? -
I put CK's website through the Pirate Speak translator and got back this Mission statement:

[quote]

Voyage

culturekitchen be a community blog aimed at cultural creatives who believe progressive activism starts in th' galley, th' bunkroom, th' homeport, th' wallet. 'Tis open fer all who believe th' decline o' progressive an' libertarian values be havin' set us aft as a democratic nation.

culturekitchen be published by Liza Sabater.

'T one o' th' top progressive an' feminist blogs in th' United States.

Use our private messagin' system t' contact th' lass' or send th' lass' an email . . .[/quote]

My essays came back with fun titles too,
the best of the bunch perhaps,
being how PirateSpeak translated "Stupid Girls" into "lily-livered lasses."

So what do you think?
Be we wan'ing that homeport maidenhead as booty
for our cursed crew of swabbie wenches who sail th' high-tech high seas?

My English is always gonna run laps around my ability to speak Spanish, tho it's gettin better, and honestly, that's a huge part of why this blog is English-dominant. However, I also quiero demostrar that spanglish es más que una amenaza contra el español. It's a means of resistencia, or, in sunshiney terms, an opportunity for cultural contact, mutual understanding, and peaceable mingling. In short, I ain't gonna sit idly by and see only Spanish altered por el espanglish.

Today, all across the United States, Americans are staying home from work and school or shutting down their businesses in in solidarity with Day without an immigrant strike. Since no one can tell if you are a perra on the internets, take this as an open invitation to join our multilingual political bachata. You write in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Hebrew, Arabic? We want them all!

I hate to admit this, what with being an independentista and all ... but, WOW! This is an amazingly catchy interpretación of the Unites States national anthem.

And let me stress this is not only an interestingly subversive translation of the song but a brilliant musical interpretation of the original anthem:

Nuestro Himno
(click to listen)

Amenece, ¿ lo veis?
A la luz de la aurora
Lo que tanto aclamamos la noche al caer
Sus estrellas, sus franjas flotaban ayer
En el fiero combate en señal de victoria.

Fulgor de lucha,
Al paso de la libertad
Por la noche decían: "¡Se va defendiendo!"

¡Oh, decid, "Despliega aún su hermosura estrellada"!,
Sobre tierra de libres
La bandera sagrada

Sus estrellas
Sus franjas
La libertad,
Somos iguales
Somos hermanos,
Es nuestro himno.

En el fiero combate en senal de victoria,
Fulgor de lucha
Al paso de la libertad
Por la noche decían: "¡Se va defendiendo!"

¡Oh, decid, "Despliega aún su hermosura estrellada"!,
Sobre tierra de libres
La bandera sagrada

I may, end up after all, singing it.

En la red, nadie sabe si eres un perro, aunque todo el mundo se entera que eres una perra. On the web, nobody knows if you're a dog but everybody finds out you are a bitch.

Por eso cuando oí que el 1ro de mayo será la huelga "un día sin immigrantes", me pregunté : "¿Cual es la versión en la red de este evento?" That's why when I heard May 1st is the "day without an immigrant" strike, I asked myself : "What's the net version of this event?"

Bueno, en el caso de un blog ... en vez de desaparecerme es imperante entonces el reaparecerme comjo ... ahem ... la bitch latina que soy. ¡Ja!. Well, in the case of a blog, instead of disappearing it's imperative that I reappear as the perra latina I am.

This blog has jumped the proverbial bilingual tiburón.