I was a Spanish teacher for 15 years and I usually cringe at the terrible Spanish that the Americans attempt to speak on the show. Don’t get me wrong: they are still understandable, but the sig other is listening to some of the worst grammar… (imagine a 4 year old speaking English)
Clayton, however, has this one impressed. He has made few grammatical errors and has really good oral proficiency and clear oral comprehension. He is great at spontaneous conversation.
I need to know what language learning app he used! I want to work on my French and German.
The annoying thing to me is that the show puts grammatically incorrect subtitles on the non-English speakers when they speak English, even though it’s clear what they’re TRYING to say, yet for English speakers butchering Spanish, they give them perfect subtitles with the intended rather than actual translation.
Wow, I didn’t really think about that! So true.
This is my beef. Sure, I understand they don’t want to literally translate every time a non-native Spanish speaker fails to conjugate a verb. But especially for Daniele the subtitles are often generous to the point of wishful thinking
I’m so glad you brought this up bc it drives me CRAZY.
OMG yes - this also drives me nuts!!!
Totally shady that they’re being selective with translating in different manners for different people, have also noticed that and gets me so mad. But for us journalists in my country it’s standard practice to correct someone’s grammar and write what they meant to say, as long as you don’t change the significance of the sentence. It has to do with the consumer not spending time trying to understand (and worst case not understanding at all) what is being said. Also it’s extremely hard for translators to make up what would be the English equivalence of a conjugation or word that simply doesn’t exist.
BUT with that said I’m personally all for parenthesising something like “non-gramatical Spanish” before the translations, so that as many as possible understands as much as possible.
Yeah I understand why they’d just write what they meant to say, if they also did it for people speaking English as a second language
Yes! I notice this more with Ashley. Clayton’s Spanish is better, so it’s less noticeable to me. Don’t get me wrong, Ashley is understandable/conversational most of the time, but she struggles with verb conjugation, number/gender/tense agreement, and vocab to the extent where I have to read the translated subtitles to catch a corrected key part of some sentences. Also, I noticed when Manuel stormed out of the bar she 100% misunderstood what he said because she “translated” it to her friends in English and was absolutely not what he said (what she said he said was worse than what he did say). Gah I wish I could remember exactly what it was but it happened super quickly.