Thread: slang vs spanglish

Originally Posted by Fresno22

I heard a teenager tell her boyfriend this: "Hey, Dame una quebrada!"
Meaning "give me a break" !!! (accent on the "a" in Dame)
Literal Spanglish translation and sounds very funny...
But, how would you translate "give me a break" into Spanish?
Maybe: something like "Dejame en paz?" Realmente ni idea...
"Give me a break" is similar to "cut me some slack" --don't take things so seriously...pardon me..Wow!....it's my native language and I can't think of how to get the point across without using one of those 2 expressions. Perhaps, show me some consideration...as in: "Mija, you haven't cleaned your room for a week!"
"Hey mom, show me some consideration, I've been studying for finals all week."
Or, FAR more common, "Give me (Gimme) a break, I've been studying for finals all week."
Any ideas??
Thanks

How about old reliable: "Are you (you gotta be) kidding!!!"

or "Are you serious?!" or "Get real!".

But, how would you translate "give me a break" into Spanish?

Here in Cuba we would say something like:

Dame un chance.
Dame un respiro.
or something like "Suéltame" but this is not something to tell to a boyfriend...you don't really want him to let go, unless you really want him to.
but we could also say something like (and this is the translation for "take it easy")
Cógelo con calma.
...cause at the end if "you take it easy", "you also give me a break"...

It might seem to some that "Spanglish" is relatively new but far from it. It certainly is more widespread and has a name now but the practice of incorporating Spanish words (and murdering the pronuciation) into English and English words into Spanish has been happening for hundreds of years.

I have to disagree with Laura. I don't think that English speakers are concerned about keeping English "pure". We have always been open to "borrowing" words. I think Spanglish scares native Spanish speakers who want to protect their "mother tongue" from corruption far more than it bothers anybody else.

It is part of everyday life in some parts of the US. We have generations of bi-lingual people who grew up in Florida, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona speaking both languages.

My wife's family members are fourth or fifth generation Mexican-Americans who have lived on the Mexican-U.S. border forever and if you listen to their conversations you will hear a mixture of English/Spanish and many Spanglish terms. Some of the older folks still speak Spanish as their first language and some of them prefer English and they all mix the two at times. They use whichever word first comes to mind or the one that best fits what they want to say and they have been doing that for decades and decades, long before anybody ever thought to call it Spanglish.

Sometimes we have problems right here in this forum finding the right word, the best translation, to describe what we want to say. That's not a problem in the real world for people who are not worried about mixing the two languages. For the most part they simply use the English word. Spanish, for all its beauty, does not have the wide variety of words to describe things in the same detail as can be done in English, at least, not to the average speaker. Example: camioneta=small truck, suv, station wagon, pickup. van, mini-van, etc. To my knowledge, there are no specific words for these vehicles individually in Latin America. If there are, they are not well known, so if I am trying to say I own a Ford pickup I have to say "pickup" because "camioneta" does not tell you which Ford product I'm talking about.

I don't understand the fears that some people have about Spanglish. It is not going to destroy Spanish in Spain or Argentina or Cuba or Mexico and it is certainly not going to destroy English. It's all about communication and if it helps facilitate understanding then what's wrong with it?

Nothing urges me more to reply than "I have to disagree with Laura" from my good friend... (hahahaha. Private joke! Vicente and I love a good disagreement!)

Hahaha...Always fun, mi amiga!

Seriously, your opinion is really valuable, V, because you're "there"! And it's also true that those of us with Latin blood in our veins (Argentinians, for example) always feel the need to "defend" what's ours, more or less vehemently.

Well, I think part of why we so readily accept Spanglish in the U.S. is that we have nothing that is "ours" to protect. We have no cultural or language history. We got English from the Brits, although lord knows they don't speak it very well, and our "culture", such as it is, is a mixture of cultures from all over the world.

In the case of language, we are not interested in the beauty of English (a questionable notion at best) but in its utilitarianism. We tend to refine things down to the most practicable and usable form and don't worry about whether some stuffy organization is going to disagree in the manner that the RAE monitors Spanish.