¡Dame cinco! or… ¡Chócala!

When we were recording our last session of Habla Blah Blah music in Mexico, some of my previous “translating” errors became glaringly embarrassing causes for continuous chuckling at the studio. I turned to Maria (Sánchez Lozano), one of our female Spanish singers, and I said in my coolest purr, “¡dame cinco!” She, honestly, just looked at me. In perfect English, she said, “What do you mean?”

It turns out that “Give me five!” doesn’t translate! The intention does. The meaning does, but the words? No. The phrase is a colloquialism. It’s slang that differs by region and culture, though all people in the world practice some form of this casual communication… bumping knuckles, slapping skin, etc. After laughing at my naiveté, we translated, or better termed, we deciphered the correct phrase for it in Spanish and then French.

Tope là, in French, loosely translates to ‘touch this’, but it’s slang, so don’t try to find it in the dictionary. Fascinating, right? I started getting really excited… how would this translate in Greek? Russian? Chinese? Hindi? How cool would it be if you knew how to say the equivalent of “Slap me some skin, brother” or “Give me five” in any language. You could travel the world with your children and instantly offer signs of peace to strangers in a casual way. It would be a gateway phrase into another culture, another family, a new friendship!

Flash forward about a year later, and here we are. We want to do this, but we need help. We need people. We need YOUR expertise and connections. It gives me goose bumps (another phrase that I love to translate across languages because it doesn’t translate verbatim) to think of the possibility of assembling a collection of HIGH FIVEs across as many languages as possible. Send this to all of your friends! Go viral!! Let’s translate this song to as many languages as possible and put together a HIGH FIVE album that celebrates world peace and communication.

Here is a link to all of the downloadables that you’d need in English, Spanish, French – the music, the lyrics, and the instrumental.

Can you translate? Or do you know someone who can? Can you sing it in another language? Please, please send it in… written, recorded, or filmed, and we will publish you. I treasure the nuances of any language, and I love that some meanings just don’t translate perfectly.

Help us make the HIGH FIVE project come to life and take the challenge!

{First photo by  TheModernGypsy. Second photo courtesy of Amy Conroy}

This is the time of year when our family has multiple visits to the doctor. The kids are getting their annual physicals for school and we are catching up on dental appointments and the like. I’ve spent a good amount of time in waiting rooms in the past month. A doctor’s office presents an opportunity for people-watching, and I’ve been surprisingly interested by what I’ve seen as I watch families doing nothing more than waiting together, filling out forms, and chit-chatting… in Spanish.

Though Orlando is bursting with Latino culture, I am starting to notice what a significant change this demographic has made to our most basic activities. Instead of filling in one sheet of paper for kids’ health history, we now have to sift through several pages because all the questions are duplicated in Spanish. Still, the parents I see in the waiting room sometimes have to have their children help out with understanding medical terminology, even if it has been translated. Dialect and slang can interfere with reading well in Spanish, and the extent to which this could affect someone’s ability to understand the medical care his/her child receives is a concern I never thought of before.

Also, I have observed that the majority of nurses and physicians’ assistants I see now are Latino. It seems that the healthcare field has absorbed a huge number of first- and second-generation Americans. While this means there are long-term jobs available to this population, it also seems to represent a complete change in job description and expectations for some positions. In my observation, bilingual nurses are spending double the time with Spanish-speaking parents that they do with English-speaking ones — sometimes to discuss health matters, and sometimes just to chat about food, family and home countries. I have recently wondered, upon watching a nurse spend an extra 15 minutes talking in the hallway with a Spanish-speaking family, if I should just pretend I don’t speak English so that I can get that sort of attention to my questions.

Along with the positive change in the availability of social and medical services for Americans with subpar English skills comes a culture-based camaraderie that has leached into the professional world. Although I am supportive of having Spanish speakers and forms available in a medical office, I am struck by how annoyed I sometimes feel when a mere demonstration of need for translation means that someone will get better service than I will.

It’s an ongoing challenge for me to stand on the border between Latinos and Americans. Having been part of more than one Latino family and having spoken Spanish for a while, I have a soft spot for their plight and believe they deserve the same treatment as all other Americans. However, as a gringa, I sense that certain boundaries are being ignored. This is especially true when I discover that I’ve only been sitting in a waiting room for so long because someone else is having a personal conversation. Furthermore, they likely assume that I don’t understand that they aren’t talking about anything medical.

Am I being too sensitive to the familiar style of Latino culture in a place of business or is this a genuine example of cultural preference?

{Photo by brettneilson}

Photo by luis de bethencourt

As we announced last week, a new expert has joined the SpanglishBaby family and we couldn’t be more excited! Her name is Liza Sánchez and her area of expertise is bilingual education. She received her MA in Education at UC Berkeley and has spent many years teaching in both public and independent schools. She is the founder and Board Chair of Escuela Bilingüe Internacional (EBI) in Oakland, California. EBI is the first independent school in California to offer a Spanish-English dual language program, extending from pre-K through 8th grade. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area and is fluent in Spanish and English, speaks conversational German and can understand quite a bit of French, Portuguese and Italian.

Liza Sánchez

As if all this weren’t enough, another super interesting thing about Liza is that she’s a mom to four multilingual daughters between the ages of 2 and 18. Talk about going through the stages in this journey! Here’s how Liza describes her household situation when it comes to languages: “We speak Spanish at home, English in the community and German with my mother who they see frequently. My five and seven-year old also attended a German preschool where my 2 year-old will soon go. My oldest is now learning her fifth language. She learned Spanish at home and is now studying Spanish literature in school, she attended a French-American school, studied German in high school and with my mother and is now learning Arabic. She’s one lucky kid.”

Wow! Sounds amazing and inspiring, right?

Ok, on to this week’s question and answer:

Will translating everything overwhelm and confuse my child?

This week’s question came from Marianna Coll who lives in Los Angeles with her 27-month-old girl and husband. They are both from Venezuela and use the mL@H method.

“We are the proud parents of a bilingual girl who is absorbing both cultures at a very fast rate. In occasions I find that I am the only one who can fully understand her since she switches so much back and forth from both languages.

At her toddler group, one of the teachers communicated to me that at this age she shouldn’t know as much as she does, she knows her colors really well, most in English and recognizes shapes and all the letters of the alphabet. This she does solely in English. Sometimes I repeat the word or the letter in Spanish, but I don’t want to overwhelm her. With the numbers, once she processed them in English, she started counting then in Spanish and I feel that she will do the same with the rest.

My question is: should I repeat everything in Spanish after she says it in English? Since I know that many of her friends are not near knowing the letters, I don’t want to confuse her and over-saturate her little brain that absorbs so much. Or, should I let her assimilate it on her own like she did with numbers and is starting to do with colors?

Another thing is that the school that we chose none of the teachers speak Spanish and I am OK with that because I am really happy with the school that we chose, we can give her Spanish at home, that can be our special thing, so I don’t want her to feel left out and not being able to communicate, there is a little girl in her school that her parents only spoke in Hebrew to her and she is having a really hard time understanding and participating in class.

Thanks!

Dear Marianna:

Congratulations on raising a bilingual child! As you have already experienced, it isn’t easy. In fact, it can be quite challenging to maintain your native language as your child grows. There is so much English surrounding them that it can become difficult to assure they receive adequate opportunities to use their home language. Since your child is in an English environment at school, you and your husband will need to continue to use only Spanish with her at home. It sounds like she is already speaking quite a bit of English since you are feeling the need to repeat what she says in Spanish.

It is best to avoid becoming a translator. She needs to be able to think in each language independently. In addition, you will need to encourage her to use only Spanish with you. That might mean not responding when she addresses you in English thereby forcing her to use Spanish. Don’t be worried that she might not know how to say something. She’ll find a way to let her desires be known without using English.

Your main concern seems to be about overwhelming your child and confusing her with both English and Spanish. I want to assure you that it is not possible to over-saturate her brain with too much language. Most children around the world learn 2 if not 3-4 languages simultaneously. Children have even been documented learning up to 5-6 languages simultaneously with no problem. Your daughter, at her age, is a powerful language-learning machine. Her brain is wired to take it all in. That is her job right now and it appears she is doing a very good job of it.

According to Dr. Susan Curtiss, a Professor of Linguistics at UCLA who specializes in the way children learn languages:

“…the power to learn language is so great in the young child that it doesn’t seem to matter how many languages you seem to throw their way…They can learn as many spoken languages as you can allow them to hear systematically and regularly at the same time. Children just have this capacity. Their brain is just ripe to do this…there doesn’t seem to be any detriment to…develop(ing) several languages at the same time.”

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association confirms this belief:

“Children all over the world learn more than one language without developing speech or language problems. Bilingual children develop language skills just as other children do.”

It sounds like your child is well on her way to becoming bilingual. She is lucky to have such dedicated parents who are ensuring her success. I wish you much luck!

If you want more info about bilingual education, you can also find Liza blogging about it at Bilingual Talk.

Do you have a question for our experts? Remember no question is too big or too simple. So, to send us your question, please click here or leave a comment below. Thank you!