History of translation: "Three Little Pigs" with a Spanish Flavor

Everyone knows the tale "The Three Little Pigs" since childhood: a pig built a house of straw, the second one from the branches, and the third one put a lot of efforts to build a house of bricks. Wolf easily destroyed the first two houses but the piglets could safely take refuge in the third one.



The text we got first was the adapted translation of the tale. All the verbs were in Present tense (Presente) most probably because learners knew only this tense. Therefore the verb ser (to be) was everywhere translated in the 3rd person of plural as son. However in the second version that our Spanish native speaker translated taking into consideration cultural specifics of Spanish language especially for our client eran (Imperfecto) was used. In Russian language in most cases we also use the Past tense in tales: "Once upon a time there lived an old man and an old woman and they owned a chicken Ryaba…"

The second and the most important correction was to replace the "Grey wolf" with the "Cruel wolf" (Lobo Feroz in Spanish). In this case the Spanish folklore tradition played the key role.

The house produced from "branchlets" (rama) or "wants" (tronco) was replaced by the Spanish translator with "from wood" (madera).

Thus, the client got two versions of translation to Spanish: the word-for-word translation from Russian to Spanish and the translation taking into consideration cultural specifics of the target country language (Spanish).

The Flarus translation agency employs native speakers from different countries and regions. Therefore we can complete your translation considering the needed geography: Brazilian Portuguese or European Portuguese; British English or American English; Serbian Latin alphabet (gaevitsa) or Serbian Cyrillic alphabet (vukovitsa) etc.

Click here to read it in Russian.