Holy moly!
A clip from Atlético de Madrid's recent Champions League match has been doing the rounds on social media over the last couple of days.
It's a great video showing Rodrigo Riquelme's emotional reaction to being awarded player of the match. Having spent the last few years on loan, it clearly meant a lot to him to be playing so well for the first team.
Being a translator, my attention was inevitably drawn to the English subtitles embedded in the video, particularly the way they'd translated "Joder" as "Holy moly!"
It's an unusual choice but one I really enjoyed, and it got me thinking about what options I might have considered if I were tasked with the subtitles.
If you look up "Joder" in a bilingual dictionary, you'll find all sorts of effing and jeffing, but not only might you want to avoid using such strong language in your social posts, its use in Spanish isn't always quite so vulgar.
You'll certainly hear it used much more freely on TV, for example, than you might with some of the stronger English words in the UK.
Softer alternatives, like "Damn" or "Oh my God", can still cause some offence in English, so perhaps I'd have gone with a simple "Wow!", depending on the client's request, but I doubt I'd have ever thought to use "Holy moly!"
But, of course, that doesn't mean it's a bad choice. There are dozens of ways of expressing his shock and joy, and "Holy moly!" does just that.
So, not only did the translator get the message across in a family-friendly way, but they also gave me plenty to think about in terms of translating vulgar expressions!
I'll link the video below, and I'd love to hear any suggestions you might have for the translation in question or if anything similar has come up in your language pairs!
#LITranslation #Football #Spanish