Let’s revisit a topic we’ve seen in different lights at different times: How the English and Spanish versions of Baldo may differ in how a joke works.
Here the joke comes off okay in English, as based in written language (or anyhow spelling). The specifics won’t work in Spanish, so they settle for a less striking point.
P.S. The previous day’s comic clarifies that “work for me” probably means more like “as a substitute” than like “as an employee”.
I recall a memoirish article by someone who had been a simultaneous-translation officer at the UN. They recounted most proudly the occasion when they were doing the key Russian-to-English translation for a top Soviet official, who made a point using a very familiar (to Russians) quoted phrase from Pushkin [I’m guessing at this memory], and our protagonist came up with a Shakespeare phrase covering much the same idea, which they substituted! On the fly! [Or maybe they saw a written text just before going on?] Gosh, I hope it wasn’t That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
Well, whatever issues that sort of thing may present for literalist fans, there is no problem if an artist or writer is doing their own translation; or, indeed, preparing versions in different languages without picking out an “original” and a “translation”. And since these paired Macanudo strips give the sources for the quotations, this is a fine thing.
I didn’t know anything about Charly García, but here’s Wikipedia to the rescue.
Oh, and with some help from Google Translate, the Charly García line put in English could be “This is endurance”, and the Gloria Gaynor line put in Spanish could be “[Yo] Sobreviviré”.
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Very considerate of the English captioning to inform us these are tamales, which is not mentioned in the Spanish, and may not have been that obvious. In panel 2, invierno means winter, but I’m glad to learn that it might be a way Spanish speakers refer to what Anglophone North America calls “the holidays” or “the holiday period”.
But the crux of the puzzlement is in the final panel. We have the material for a pun, in partial split meanings: masa by itself can mean dough, and masacre written solid would be the obvious massacre, or as Google Translate for some reason prefers, slaughter. But we have to ask, if there are fluent or native Spanish speakers here, does this work for you as a joke?
I thought I *knew*, as an evidence-based origins account and “official” answer, that the term flack for a public relations officer was closely tied to flak “anti-aircraft fire” — via the intermediate occupational descriptive term flak-catcher for their role in deflecting or absorbing abuse and accusation. And that this was popularized in Tom Wolfe’s essay title “Maumauing the Flack Catchers”. (His flak-catchers were local bureaucrats rather than p.r. agents but the idea was closely related.)
But I wanted to check with something besides my own memory, in scholarly sources or some easily-accessible online approximation thereto.
And so, how disappointing that Dictionary.com gives us a story about some guy named Flack, and no mention of flak except a link in a “words sometimes confused with flack” section.
1935–40; said to be after Gene Flack, a movie publicity agent
Well! At least some support from Etymonline, though they also give precedence to Gene Flack, but give some skeptical considerations against him.
flack (n.)
“publicity or press agent,” in Variety headlines by September 1933; sometimes said to be from name of Gene Flack, a movie agent, but influenced later by flak. There was a Gene Flack who was an advertising executive in the U.S. during the 1940s, but he seems to have sold principally biscuits, not movies, and seems not to have been in Variety in the ’30s.
Although they were invented in the 1940s, household microwave ovens did not become widespread until the mid 1970s, but I know for certain that I’ve been using the verb “nuke” (as a synonym for “cook in a microwave“) for at least four decades, because I vividly remember the puzzlement it caused for a friend’s son in the early 1980s. I find it somewhat surprising that the term could become so commonly accepted in less than a decade, but thinking back, this may be the very first time that I have ever seen the word “nuke” used in this sense in printed (albeit comic) form.
Ah, the legacy of “Who’s on first?” never runs dry!
Lost in Translation?
There are some who object to shrimp scampi on the grounds that it is somewhat a translated-redundancy; based on
/ ˈskæm pi, ˈskɑm- /
noun,plural scam·pi.Italian Cooking.
but then there is 2. a dish of shrimp or prawns grilled or sautéed in oil or butter and garlic, which is what we want shrimp scampi to mean.
Parallel to our question for Baldo, but probably with opposite conclusion, this pair suggests confirmation that for Macanudo the Spanish version comes first and the English results from translation.
The humor is from, well first of all the behaviors of the two species, but after that the creative way the suffixes are used in the Spanish. (I don’t think the -ota is entirely standard. but is creatively deployed to convey “large”. Comments welcome from experts and fluent or native speakers!)
McEldowney’s meaning for gink must be quite different from the one I am most familiar with!
The Urban Dictionary of course gives some dozen unrelated entries of varying plausibility, some of which could work in this cartoon context. (But none of which are exactly mine.) The slang section of dictionary.com is more sober, but the main American entry could work with the cartoon:
noun Slang: Sometimes Disparaging and Offensive.
a person; fellow.
Is that all there is to it? Or do you see a better fit for one of the other definitions?
Comics I Don't Understand 