Spanish Translators Corner

This is a new and exciting section just for you—the Spanish translator—to share your lexical experiences with your peers, your Spanish translation frustrations, challenges and wins. How did you handle a complex term when you couldn’t find just
a Spanish word that did the trick? What was your thought process? How did you finally translate it? Did you end up “creating”
a word, or using a word that you found on the Internet? By sharing all this with others like yourself we all win and improve the Spanish translations we provide to our clients, at the same time that we are contributing to create new words that will eventually make it into the RAE dictionary.

This is not a forum, so it is not a place to ask for answers to your translation dilemma, it is a place to share the lexical decisions you made, so your entries need to be approved by the Spanish editorial team at Strictly Spanish. Your entry has
to relate to the Spanish translation field, whether it is English-to-Spanish translations or Spanish-to-English translations and
be of value to everyone.

If you have something to share and would like us to post it, please send the entry to info@strictlyspanish.com and on the subject area write: Spanish Translators Corner submission. Include your email, name, address and whether you are a freelancer or a staff translator. It would interesting to also have, if you care to share, the name of the company you work for.
All entries must be no more than 400 words. In rare occasions we would publish longer pieces. All entries would be edited
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What to do when a word doesn’t exist—revisited

Posted February 11, 2006

By Adriana Cruz Santacroce, Team Leader, Strictly Spanish LLC

adriana[at]strictlyspanish.com

I was recently consulted by an Officer at an international organization with reference to the Spanish translation of the English term “decision makers.”

Up to now, this term has been normally translated with a periphrasis like one of these: "quienes toman las decisiones”, “quienes toman decisiones”, “los que toman las decisiones” or “los que toman decisiones” (those who make the decisions, those who make decisiones). I wondered if there was a shorter form to translate it into Spanish. The first word that came to mind was "decisor”, but I imagined that the word might not exist nor be correct. So, I went on a quest to see if it could be correct or if I could use it.

So I asked myself, “Isn't the word 'decisor’ morphologically correct?” “Doesn’t it follow a paradigm?”

In Spanish we have words like “traductor” and “revisor.” All of them perform the verb action, and they follow a paradigm: el traductor traduce (the translator translates), el revisor revisa (the proofreader proofreads).

In Spanish the “decisor” is the actor, the person in charge of decision making and is not necessarily a calque, or the result of the English influence.

This is the sort of reasoning that an expert lexicographer like José Martínez de Sousa would follow: A word may not exist but if it is correctly formed, it is valid and usable.

A group of editors from the same international organization finally consulted the “Español al Día" department of the RAE (Spanish Royal Academy). And their answer was: The word “decisor” has been accepted by the RAE and it will be added to the upcoming 23^rd edition of the DRAE (Royal Academy Spanish Dictionary), both in the noun and adjective categories.

Once again, if we follow what we have been taught, apply good thinking, do research, and come to a consensus with colleagues, we can always come up with the right word, whether it exists or not before we started our quest. Once it becomes widely used, as it is the case with most “created-out-necessity” words, it is only a matter of time before the RAE accepts it and adds it to the dictionary.