Joy of Spanish
A Computer by Any Other Name
This column might be useless. Or almost useless. Sort of like telling Spaniards living abroad how English speakers talk about bullfighting. And that is the exact analogy I use when referring to all the English words in computer-related vocabulary. You see, many Spanish-speaking purists get upset over all the “Englishisms” (anglicismos) that crop up in computer lingo. I say “So what?” and point out how impossible it would be to talk about bullfighting without using 42,387 Castillian terms, perfectly untranslated and untranslatable.
English speakers have had absolutely nothing to do with the development of the art of bullfighting (and I am not going to get in a polemic over this; I use the phrase in the sense of tauromaquia, literally “the art of bullfighting”), and thus the vocabulary involved is purely Spanish. If you don’t believe me, you can check out the internet sites, in English, dedicated to this pastime.
So this column is going to be about something you may very well have mastered in English, but not in Spanish: computerese. But be careful: it is not enough to just throw in any old English word, because there is a specific way of using them or not using them in Mexico. Every country is different in this sense, and there are no fast rules that apply here. Things are the way they are because they just seem to have worked out that way.
So let’s start at the beginning. A computer is a computadora, in feminine. Spaniards get off on saying “ordenador,” which is a loan word from the French ordinateur. So much for linguistic purity. We also call them máquinas, pecés and, in some cases, compus.
On and off: encendido y apagado. No big deal. To boot up the machine is to encender, butear or arrancar it. The monitor is a monitor, sometimes called a pantalla (screen). The keyboard is a teclado. The box itself is a gabinete or caja, and inside we have a fuente de poder (power source); a disco duro (hard disk); a procesador (the basic processor, as in a Pentium chip, or whatever); a tarjeta principal or madre, which is the motherboard, although many people just say moderbor because it’s shorter; tarjetas controladoras, which are the boards that control the hard disk, modem, cd or dvd rom drive or whatnot.
The word “chip” is usually not translated. “Modem” turns into módem very well, and cd-rom is pronounced, more often than not, as cede-rom, “say-day rome,” with a long “O”, but some people inexplicablly pronounce it “say-day room” to rhyme with “broom.” Don’t ask me why; I have no idea. DVD’s are dividís, or devedés.
The printer is the impresora, and the old floppy units were unidades de disco flexible, or unidades de flopi. Los USB son uesebé. We talk about memoria ram (ram: Random Access Memory) in terms of megas or gigas (megabytes or gigabytes). Files are archivos although in Spain they say archiveros, which in Mexico are filing cabinets.
Notice that nobody here translates either “byte” or “bit.” For some strange reason, when referring to the Uninterrupted Power Source (ups), the little box that makes life glorious when there are power failures (apagones), the word most used in Mexico is no break, which as far as I can gather is not used in the United States or the British Commonwealth. I may be wrong, though. Just don’t forget to buy and use one, whatever you wish to call it, because Hell hath no fury like that of a man or woman who just lost six hours of work in a one-second power outage.And back up regularly. The verb is respaldar, and your backups are respaldos. Many people say backup, but this loan is unnecessary.
Spread sheets are hojas de cálculo; data bases are bases de datos; a word processor is a procesador de palabras, with an “s” on the end (don’t forget that). Windows is windows, screen savers are protectores de pantalla, an operating system is a sistema operativo. On to the Internet. It is not necessary to use an article with Internet in Spanish, although some people do. Without an article it is employed as if it were a proper noun. “www,” or “World Wide Web” is not translated per se, although la or el web is often known as la red, and it’s a synonym for the Internet itself, which is —of course— a mistake. A nerd is a nerd in just about any language or country, and a hacker is still a hacker, although the word still can have a positive connotation in Mexico. A hacker engaged in criminal activities would be a cracker (just like in English) or if engaging in illegal copying, a pirata. A virus is a virus, and if a computer is infected, we say it is virulenta or infectada. When installing virus protection, one says that the computer has been vacunada, “vaccinated.” Eliminating the virus itself is a question of “cleaning it out.” The verb is limpiar, desvirular or desinfectar.
This could go on and on and I’m not sure how useful this is, but I decided to write the column because on several occasions, when in the U.S., I’d become tongue tied trying to talk to computer sales people in English simply because I’m accustomed to using the words and phrases most employed in Mexico. I can imagine how difficult it could be for English-speaking people trying to communicate with Spanish-speaking sales people south of the border.
Anybody for baseball in Spanish? This is even more fun! There is a big difference, however: baseball has been around for a long time in Spanish and it has developed its own unique and colorful vocabulary. Stay tuned…
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