[NTLK] Gosh... is Spanish a wide language...

[David Gibson]

> 
> Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2010 01:59:18 +0200
> From: "Frank Gruendel" <newtontalk at pda-soft.de>
> Subject: [NTLK] Gosh... is Spanish a wide language... Please help me
>     make    things shorter :-(
> To: <newtontalk at newtontalk.net>
> Message-ID: <FA522C98302148368B9DE421BD5D62ED at xpdesktop>
> Content-Type: text/plain;    charset="iso-8859-1"
> 
> Could those of you who speak Spanish please have a look here?
> 
>     <http://www.pda-soft.de/es/hardware/eMate/ematecable/ematecable.html>
> 
> I think you'll recognize my problems...
> 
> I need something shorter for
> 
> a) Mapa del Sitio (Site Map)
> 
> b) Caj?n de Sastre (This & That)
> 
> c) Un Grito de Ayuda (Cry for help)
> 
> d) Libro de Visitas (Guest book)
> 
> e) The banner text (eMate display cable)
> 
> All this fits perfectly in English and German :-(
> 
> I'd rather not line-wrap the text in banners and buttons. And I'd rather not
> change the whole layout
> for the Spanish section. I could of course make the font smaller, but this
> would make the buttons on
> the left-hand side much more difficult to read.
> 
> So any ideas will be much appreciated.
> 
> Frank
>>>>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
> 
> Yes, indeed, Spanish is a wide language. In the agency in which I work, they
> produce a bi-lingual English-Spanish Engineering Newsletter. They gave up
> producing it in parallel columns because the Spanish versions were always 25%
> to 33% longer. They now produce it as two double sided newsletters bound
> together with an English newsletter starting on one side of the booklet  and a
> Spanish newsletter starting on the other side and both working towards the
> middle. In this way, the fact that one newsletter has 25 to 33% more words
> does not burn up white space.
> 
> The same simplicity of constructions and regular rules and simpler nouns and
> adjectives which make Spanish one of the easiest languages to learn work
> against making expressions short. The same complexities of construction,
> irregular rules and multiplicity of words with almost the same meaning, but
> not quite, make English a nightmare to learn. But the complexities also make
> it easier to write English very concisely, expressively and in ways easy to be
> misunderstand.
> 
> Have a nice week,
> David
> 
>