Lost In Translation

Imagine going to Canada for spring break and you ask someone at your hotel where the grocery store is and they tell you that they have no idea what you´re talking about. ¨A grocery store?¨¨ You repeat. ¨¨You don´t know what a grocery store is?¨¨ ¨¨I have no idea what you´re talking about.¨¨ Well that´s weird, you think, I thought they spoke English here...

This, or some form of this, happens to me frequently. Chileans claim to speak Spanish but sometimes I feel like it´s a different language entirely. I asked Adriana, the farm owner, if she´d seen my camisa verde anywhere and she looked at me and said flatly that she had no idea what I was talking about. A camisa! You don´t know what a camisa is?¨ I laughed. For any non spanish speakers a camisa is a shirt. I´m pretty sure it was roughly the tenth word I learned in Spanish and here she was clueless. I pulled at my shirt and asked what she called it. ¨¨ohhhh, si¨¨ the response came smoothly, ¨una pulera¨¨
Of course.

The Spanish in Chile is highly stylized. They love their diminutives; aguita, riquito, fresquito, un pancito. They also drop ¨s¨s whenever they want. So ¨dos¨ becomes ¨doh¨ and ¨las tomates¨ becomes ¨lah tomate.¨ And thus it is a constant game of trying to figure out what exactly they are saying. Is there supposed to be an s there and they dropped it? Or is it another word that I just don´t recognize without an s. Additionally, there are a bounty of words that you find only in Chile. Paltas (aguacates), puleras (camisas), torros de lomo (topes), arros (aretes), etc. And so it has been quite an adventure having to navigate and learn all this new vocabulary and slang. Living on the farm, I was less exposed to the slang but now that I´m with Nora and talking with more Chilean students I´m overwhelmed by a wave of new words. Really though it´s quite fun to get good at speaking like the Chileans do. And any time I (or any gringo) integrates Chilean into there spanish it gets a laugh of approval.

It is my language that gives away my foriegness more than anything. Chileans speak rapidly and heavily. But then I get in the cab and speak lightly and springily but more or less slowly and it´s a dead give away. There was a period where I resented how hard it was to understand Chilean Spanish but now I just feel indebted to it. Because it´s so hard to understand and because there are so many different words to learn, I´ve had to work that much harder on my Spanish and gotten that much better. I don´t feel that I will ever be 100% fluent in Spanish but right now I feel totally content and confident in my abilities.