lost in translation: forgetting English

Yowza I have not posted a Lost in Translation piece in a while! Remember what they are even about? (Hint: My experience learning Spanish abroad.)

Once I got into a steady rhythm of speaking Spanish everyday, sometimes my English would come out muddled. Since Spanish has a much smaller vocabulary than English, many times the words that stuck in its lexicon happen to be cognates of English’s fancier word bank. This means that at times I sounded like a very classy Brit when I would directly translate back from Spanish into English. “I’m enchanted to meet you,” “Would you like to take a coffee on the terrace?” “I’m going to pass a small while reading now,” or, “I’m absolutely enamored of this Zara top.”

I always took this as a great sign—my foreign language was conquering my native one!—but sometimes my backwards translations would have consequences, like when I exclaimed to my friend Luc one day, “Professor Antonio just assigned us a 20-page-paper due in a week. He molests me so much sometimes!”