intertwingly

In high school, I took Spanish from 7th grade through 11th grade, though 11th grade was a disaster.  Unbeknownst to me, the teacher decided to go off the published curriculum, and decided that we knew enough of the language, and needed to learn about the culture.  And by culture, I’m not talking about the oblique reference to Teen Talk Barbie in the title of this post, I’m talking about long dead poets and artists.

In the intervening years, I’ve lost most of my confidence in my ability to confidently speak the language, but I have retained some ability to read the language.

I should have known better, but when I started to take a deep dive into Localizing Rails for the purpose of adding coverage to this in AWDwR3, I thought I could handle translating the dozen and a half phrases that appeared on the website.

That turned out to be much harder than I would have thought.

The first word was home.  Google translate suggested casa.  That’s a building.  Home pages on the web seem to be more commonly referred to as a pagina inicio, and links to the same are often simply inicio.  Initial, start, makes sense.

A cart is either a carro (basket) or a carrito (a little basket).  The latter seems slightly more common, so I’m going with that.  Links to a contact page sometimes were contacto and other times were contractar (differing in verb tense) but again I’ll go with the more common, which in this case seems to be the former.

Google translate suggested pedir for checkout, which translates back to ask.  Looking around, I found references to caja (box) for checking out in a supermarket context, but eventually I settled on comprar (buy).

Blank becomes en blanco which is in white, which gives me pause.  Hay que dar is must be given, but generally precedes the noun.  Debe ser siempre is a phrase that can be used following the noun.  And the context here is a list of fields, each followed by a message.

When I first tried it, I’m pretty sure that place order returned lugar final, which is closer to a final resting place than a submission, but now it seems to be returning the more reasonable realizar el pedido.

When talking about an data entry error that prohibits an order from from being saved, google translate suggests salvado.  I want something a bit more... secular.  To be fair, saved in English means rescued as well as stored.  Se guarde seems like a closer match.

I doubt database fields are campos, I suspect atributos is closer.

For those who want to either poke fun at, or help out, a gringo, here’s my translation file, as well as a screenshot that captures most of the data.