Thread: A Colombian saying

Algunas conductas humanas guardan cierta semejanza con el troquelado, pues tienen un periodo crítico de aprendizaje, y lo aprendido nunca se olvida. Por ejemplo, hay un periodo crítico para formar lo tabúes alimentarios, y son prácticamente indelebles. Por eso dicen que al marrano con lo que lo crían. Las fobias se forman temprano y tienen la rigidez del troquelado.

Can anyone help me with the words in Italics. I believe it is a Colombian saying

Thanks for that Gernt. Yes, the book has been published both in hard cover and on the Internet in Spanish. But the English version is also available at www.villegaseditores.com/sapiens. I translated the book for the author, but wasn't completely satisfied with the translation I did of this saying: the pig does not hate the things he ate when he was small. I couldn't think of an equivalent in English so more or less translated it literally. I can see there is a lot of merit in your English equivalent and it seems to fit the context quite well. By the way, I think it is a really good book and one worth reading.

Yes, I think it is a particularly Colombian saying, and as I said, I could not think of an equivalent in English, but translated literally it made sense. It is always a problem as to whether or not you should translate something like that literally or look for an equivalent. In general, I think the latter is better, but if you can´t find one, then literal is OK so long as it makes sense, and I think it does here. The translation took me about four months...640 pages, but I was doing it jointly with the author, Antonio Vélez who has a working knowledge of English. So, I would do a chapter or two a week and email it over to him to check. The biggest problem was the technical words in biology, anthropology, neuroscience etc, but eventually we managed to find the English equivalents. Another problem was where he had quoted from a book originally published in Spanish but translated into English. It was impossible to reproduce the original text without actually getting the original English version. This was not physically possible so in those instances I had to change the text into indirect speech. What sort of translations do you do?

Well, I am the same age, 63 and I started learning Spanish about 11 years ago, and just loved it. I used the internet a lot as it was just starting then, and got into chat lines and all sorts of things, read lots of books in Spanish with an English translation and generally tried to make the hard slog fun. I decided to translate a book because I thought it would help me increase my vocabulary and got hooked. The first one was El Olvido Que Seremos by Hector Abad Faciolince, a very powerful biography and autobiography. I got the author's permission, the deal being he could have the copyright in my translation so long as I had the right to give it to my friends who could not understand Spanish. Then I did Homo Sapiens by Antonio Velez, and you can find that on the internet www.villegaseditores.com/sapiens I have just finished the first draft of another book by Hector Abad. All of this, I might add, I have done without payment, just for fun and to improve my Spanish. You are right, it is much more difficult to learn a language when you get older, and I have to do a bit of Spanish every day, but it can be done, and they say that it staves off dementia for a while!!