Asymmetry in translation dictionaries

I’m at the mercy of online translation dictionaries to do this project and I’m using them a lot and thus gradually learned some of their eccentricities. So I thought I’d mention a very simple example. This is based on using spanishdict.com which in general is a tremendously helpful source and thanks to them very much for providing it, free, online.

But I’ve found a challenging issue of asymmetry in looking up Spanish words to get English versus looking up English words to get Spanish. For instance, for Spanish word X you might get English results A, B, C, but then looking up A or B or C you may not get the original X and/or you get Y and Z Spanish words. Likewise, as this example will show you look up English word D, which was not in the list for lookup of X, but it does show X.

Here’s what I mean in example (this is GallinaBlanca’s definition of gourmets (yes with the s)).

Persona entendida y de gustos refinados en la gastronomía.

The spanishdict translation is

Understood person and of refined tastes in the gastronomy.

Now needless to say this looks a little clunky PLUS ‘understood’ just doesn’t seem to fit. Matching the bits of the sentence it is entendida that is being translated to understood. Looking up entendida in spanishdict.com it is listed under the verb entender (to understand).  Digging through the conjugation on the spanishdict’s page for this very entendido is listed as the past participle (don’t understand the masculine form there and the feminine form in the sentence, but that’s a different mystery). Hence ‘understood’ is the direct literal translation.

But reading the sentence and knowing what a gourmet is (that word being a loanword into Spanish) I thought ‘knowledgeable’ would fit the definition much better. Now while ‘know’ is one of the definitions of entender (as intransitive verb) it’s hard, from just scanning spanishdict’s entry on entender to conclude ‘knowledgeable’ is one of the meanings.

So here is the asymmetry (just this one example, I’ve encountered this before in multiple case). Lookup up ‘knowledgeable’ in spanishdict.com.  Under the general sense of “knowing a lot” the first translation is informado which is qualified with the sense (of current affairs). Then second translation is  entendido  which is qualified with the sense of (about a specific area). And the third is  culto which is qualified with the sense of (in general).

Now (and I should have tried this before launching into this post) looking up entendido (instead of the entendida used in the original text) spanishdict tells me this is ‘expert’ which might be even better than ‘knowledgeable’.

So what is the point? If one has studied a foreign (to them) language a lot and really gotten into its structure and rules and vocabulary, plus colloquial usage, all these things I’m noticing are probably obvious and a fluent Spanish speaker would probably laugh at my stumbling through these things. Fine, that’s not the point. I’m writing these posts for people like me, i.e. willing to acquire some familiarity with Iberian Spanish for the pragmatic purpose of getting what you want at restaurants. Sure, fluent conversational skill in Spanish is an excellent idea for an extended tour of Spain but that may not be feasible. (I’ve consulted with a couple of people who’ve studied Spanish for years and, frankly, they haven’t been much help on some of the details I’ve been encountering as they are more focused on broad and general conversations).

And in contrast hauling along some small paper translation or phrase guide (as I’ve done in multiple countries) or these days using an app on your app (assuming you want to pay the stiff tariffs for Net connection while trekking) these tools do these same simple things I’ve been doing in this project AND THUS often getting a bad answer. Now unless you want to spend hours analyzing a menu before placing your order it’s best to have something more sophisticated than the best tools available today. Now maybe in a few decades Google (or someone) will have an incredibly great translation app but the state of the art today leaves a lot of gaps. So, now, entendida human translation beats the machine and if I succeed, at least for a narrow area of discourse, I hope to create that more sophisticated translation for diners.