NewsTaco

By Tom Stephens, LIN@R

Just this past week, I happened to be chatting with an old friend, of Colombian birth, about life, her daughters, her husband, and of course, up pops the perennial issue: does such-and-such a word “exist” in Spanish? How could I not have an opinion?

By Hispanically Speaking News

Politicians, academics, writers and other representatives of Latino culture took the first step on Wednesday in promoting an initiative that seeks to save and preserve Spanish in New York.

“Who doesn’t like it if our children speak two languages? We win when our kids enrich themselves with another culture,” said Dominican activist and writer Mary Grateroux, emphasizing that there is no contradiction when kids learn the mother tongue of their parents simultaneously with English.

That was the premise that on Wednesday led New York state Sen. Adriano Espaillat, also of Dominican origin, to call upon different sectors of Hispanic society in the Big Apple.

Espaillat thus lent support to addressing a concern of cultural activist Ramon Badia that the children of Latino immigrants are not learning their parents’ language.

Badia described himself as a person “in love with the unity of our peoples” as pushed by Simon Bolivar, and he recalled that Spanish is the language that has maintained the unity of Latin American countries with Spain for more than 500 years.

“This was a good start. I think the talent and knowledge of how we can move forward on this project exists,” the senator told Efe after the two-hour meeting that was also attended by the New York branch of the Cervantes Institute, Javier Rioyo.

State Assemblyman Nelson Castro said that the initiative has to include the immigrant parents, many of whom have not mastered Spanish because they speak indigenous languages or they don’t do so correctly because they are illiterate.

“We have to share what was said at the meeting, to defend our peculiarities but also the strength that joins us culturally and idiomatically,” Rioyo said.

Ana Maria Garcia, the dean of Hostos Community College in The Bronx, emphasized that many immigrants have left their countries out of economic necessity “without attaining levels of education in their own language and they cannot teach their children Spanish although they have the desire to do so.”

This article was first published by Hispanically Speaking News.

[Photo by tnarik]

By Jesse Treviño, HispanicLatino

What is the deal with accents?  Some news organizations and networks noticeably have begun to accent the names of individuals, places and things that carry a Spanish spelling. Some don’t. ESPN is almost meticulous about it.  PBS not so much.  The New York Times does it; other newspapers – of all news organizations that should – do not.  How Spanish names and words began to lose their accents has itself been lost in time.  Most of the loss, of course, has to do with the disrespect for the language fueled by anti-Spanish sentiment leading up to and after the U.S.-Mexican and U.S.-Spanish wars.  As important was the market of the time.

Now, amid the new demography of the country, seeing a Spanish name in print or on a television screen with an accent stands out as much as seeing the same name the very next day without one.

How things are changing.  Most printing presses as they came to be in the United States were not developed with handy Spanish accenting hardware. And there were not many Spanish speakers hanging around Faneuil Hall in Boston or the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia.   No market, no Spanish.  Even if the hardware had been available, the composers using the presses probably would not have been aware of Spanish word structure.  At one point, many of the newspapers in the United States were printed not in English but in German, which features many accents but, again, German is not Spanish.   The precedent was set, so that by the time television came upon the scene and evolved, not accenting Spanish names and words became normal.  And, of course, years later some computers these days gag when they run into an accent of any kind.

Many HispanicLatinos in this country always have accented their names properly; others did not. As they became a vulnerable minority population, many did not want to call attention to themselves.  Others, still, were prohibited from speaking Spanish in school.  Today, more people feel comfortable accenting their names.  Many are reacting to the unyielding anti-immigrant rhetoric that many HispanicLatinos take as anti-HispanicLatino.  And more people are pronouncing their names properly and naturally so that Treviño is not tre-veno or tree-veeno but treh-veen-nyo.

Years ago, in a skit on Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Smits, if memory serves, and a fellow comedian exaggerated the pronunciation of words in Spanish.  Thus enchilada lost its quick, breezy English adaptation and became eeeen—chi—–laaa—-dah.  It was a funny way to poke fun at individuals going out of their way to be politically correct and to signify sympathy with popular uprisings in Central America.  The Sandinistas were very much in vogue.

Today, the market – not political correctness – is driving the change.  The power of demography is making the minority a majority in many places and the near-majority in others and their combined impact on the national market is unavoidable.  So HispanicLatinos now have the individual option to decide if they personally want to accent their names and to pronounce Spanish words correctly.  Networks like ESPN that were the first to develop all-Spanish programming (aside from Univisión and Telemundo) probably responded to the massive influx of Spanish-speaking baseball ballplayers from the islands and Central and South America who when asked how to spell their names wrote down their names properly accented.  Professional Spanish editors in the newsrooms also made their own editorial decisions to be correct journalistically.

More students – HispanicLatino or otherwise – taking Spanish in college to become better-equipped to handle a changing market increasingly will transfer their knowledge of Spanish and its accenting rules professionally into their work.  Lo, those who don’t.

Some of the news organizations currently behind the times will catch up soon.  Most will do so out of professional, journalistic responsibility.

More will do so to respect the demands of the new market around them.

This article was first published in HispanicLatino.

Jesse Treviño is formerly editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

[Image courtesy EcuRed]

By Tony Castro, Voxxi

The most beloved Hispanic politician I have known in a long history of reporting on Latino politics wasn’t even Hispanic.

He was a Baptist Irishman who grew up in the predominantly Latino Eastside of Los Angeles and for almost two decades beginning in 1967 alone represented the heavily Hispanic district on the City Council.

Art Snyder became such a powerful force in local politics that the Latino political establishment at the time stopped trying to oust him.

Snyder’s influence came from organizing neighborhoods, everything from senior citizens to veterans, and particularly the groups at local Roman Catholic parishes.

Guadalupanas especially loved him. When he spoke at their meetings, the women would make the Sign of the Cross whenever he said something that would draw ovations from another crowd. They would crush around him — as if he were something sacred — and they would drop religious trinkets and medals in his coat pockets.

“Es más mejicano que los mejicanos politicos,” the Guadalupanas said of him.

One of the reasons they felt that way was that Art spoke to them in Spanish, which he had learned after being elected to office and then perfected on vacations and long weekend trips to Mexico. On any Mexican holiday or whenever the occasion seemed right, a guayabera-attired Snyder would break out into Spanish oratory that drove the crowds crazy.

Art Snyder wasn’t the perfect politician, by all means, but you would get an argument from all the Latinos who loved him.

This is relevant today because of San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, the keynoter at the Democratic National Convention last week, who has become a topic of blogosphere debate over the fact that he admits to not speaking Spanish, though apparently making efforts to learn the language.

He actually made the admission some time ago, and it hasn’t been an issue of any note in San Antonio local politics.

But Castro has now entered a bigger world, where Hispanics and others in the bigger world have strong opinions on the authenticity of Latino politicians with high aspirations.

In contrast, Florida Senator Marco Rubio—the Republican to whom Castro is compared, though how you can compare the political significance of a part-time mayor with a full-time U.S. Senator seems ludicrous—speaks Spanish fluently.

Even Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, whom Castro is now rivaling for the darlingship of the Democratic Party, delivers his annual State of the City addresses, as well as other major speeches, in both English and Spanish.

A much wiser, more seasoned politician than Castro, Villaraigosa long ago learned the importance of fully capitalizing on his uniqueness of being a Hispanic politician—a uniqueness that Castro obviously can’t claim.

Villaraigosa often does live unscripted interviews in Spanish on Los Angeles Spanish television, as well as conducting parts of his news conferences in Spanish.

He knows how being a bright, rising star in Hispanic politics can all go to waste.

Art Snyder’s last political campaign is proof of that.

A young, aspiring Latino urban planner who had been tapped by President Jimmy Carter as the future of Los Angles Hispanic politics tried to take on Snyder in what became a nasty campaign.

Carter had chosen the urban planner as the family he would spend a night with in Los Angeles as he sought re-election in 1980, and the urban planner then put together a coalition of young Latino professionals, Chicano activists and liberals in his own campaign to remove Snyder.

Ultimately, the campaign turned in part on what came out of the mouth of the urban planner—or, more accurately what didn’t.

The Spanish television station KMEX hosted one of the debates, and the first question of that debate was directed at the urban planner, who froze, as if blinded by headlights.

Immediately sensing the problem, Snyder jumped in and translated the interviewer’s question from Spanish to English for the urban planner who quickly unfroze. Then he did the unimaginable. He answered—in English—and Snyder translated the answer into Spanish for the audience.

The urban planner didn’t speak Spanish—or well enough to hold his own in a debate on Spanish television.

“Te dije,” crowed Snyder after the debate. “Soy más mejicano que los mejicanos!”

This article was first published in Voxxi.

Los Angeles-based writer Tony Castro is the author of the critically-acclaimed “Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America” and the best-selling “Mickey Mantle: America’s Prodigal Son.”

[Photo by demconvention.com]

By Verdana Bold, Pocho Ñews Service

(PNS reporting from SILICON VALLEY) Attorneys for typographical characters including enya (Ñ), theinverted exclamation mark (¡) and the inverted question mark (¿) accused major computer keyboard makers of deliberately ignoring their clients’ needs in a relentless race for profits in a class action suit filed here today.

“It’s a case of acquisitiveness over accents,” visibly-angry lead attorney Cuauhtémoc Basta-Piñata (photo, above) told reporters as he emerged from the court clerk’s office. “The key cap cartels make us jump through hoops just to get ourselves equal time in the public eye, all to save a few pennies on costs.”

Basta-Piñata represents the Front for Acceptance of Character Equality (FACE). Plaintiffs in the suit also include transgender characters like И and Я as well as bi-textual characters like Ǽ and Œ.

They group is seeking $100 million in damages plus mandatory “diversity-positive” keyboard design changes.

“Look at the crap we have to go through just to get in a freakin’ Facebook status update,” said the attorney as he passed out a chart illustrating Windows key combinations. “I’//\ m@d aS |-|311 /\n|> ¡’M |\|0+ g0Nn@ +@k3 !+ ^nyM07e!”

“What’s the BFD about sticking a few extra keys on the keyboard just so I can spell piñata for example? And I’m not just saying it because it’s my name!”

Iowa Rep. Steve King (R), leading GOP “English only” advocate, was quick to respond:

I don’t know anything about keyboards. Typing is a woman’s job.

The secretive Keyboard Group (KBG), one of the defendants, faxed PNS their response:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. Nunc viverra imperdiet enim. Fusce est. Vivamus a tellus. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Proin pharetra nonummy pede. Mauris et orci.

Other defendants in the suit include A4Tech, Adesso, Alps, APEVIA, ATOP Technology, BTC, Bytecc, Chassis Plans, Cherry, Chester Creek Technologies, Chicony Electronics, Corsair Memory, Creative, DCT Factory, Inc., Enermax, Farassoo, Filco, Frisby, Fujitsu – Siemens, Gear Head, Genius, Gigabyte Technology, HIPER, HAVIT, Hama Photo, Iball, Intex, Ideazon, IOGEAR, Kensington Computer Products Group, Key Tronic, KeyScan, Labtec, Linkworld Electronics, Lite-On, Logisys Computer, Logitech, Macally (Mace Group), Metadot Corporation (Das Keyboard), Micro Innovations, Microsoft, Mitsumi, Nan Tan Computer or NTC, NMEDIAPC, OCZ Technology, Power Logic, Qumax, Razer, Rosewill, Saitek, Samsung, Sharkoon, SolidTek, Spec Research, SteelSeries, Syba, Targus, Thermaltake, Topre, Trust, TVS Electronics, Unicomp, Wolfking, Xitrix Computer Corporation and zebronics.

– Elise Roedenbeck, reporting from New York City, contributed to this report.

POCHO ÑEWS SERVICE PNS IS A WHOLLY-FICTITIOUS SUBSIDIARY OF POCHISMO, INC., A CALIFORNIA CORPORATION, WHO IS A PERSON ACCORDING TO THE SUPREME COURT.  DON’T ASK US, WE JUST WORK HERE.

[Photo by Pocho.com]

By Jose Cruz, Our Tiempo

You know that moment we all have when you check your Facebook or Twitter and everyone is commenting about one thing? This happened to me last week as the Latino world of social media was abuzz, sadly announcing the death of celebrated Mexican author Carlos Fuentes. I had a moment of pause seeing all of my friends post and thought- “Umm, who is Carlos Fuentes?” I quickly read several articles and found out, but was left with a familiar feeling of “not being Latino enough.” All of this brings me to the question of the week, “how much of our culture do we need to know?”

In my defense, I am not Mexican and was raised in the U.S. so my ignorance of a great Latin American author who wrote in Spanish is understandable. But still I received a snarky reply from a younger friend who has a degree in Latin American studies when I mentioned I didn’t know who Carlos was. In a moment of pure verbal retribution I changed subjects and asked them what they knew about the revised Dream Act legislation that Senator Marco Rubio was going to introduce. To which they replied, “I hadn’t heard about it.” This left me with a sense of intellectual validation; but I digress.

Over the years I have done a great deal of public speaking and always make an effort to be funny. As I speak to diverse groups of people I have found that connecting with your audience, especially with humor, is often a matter of affinity. What a 22-year-old Latino male finds funny is not the same as a 65- year-old white suburban grandmother. But there are ways of bridging the gap through affinity and the same rule applies with culture.

I discovered the Mexican rock group Mana three years ago because a friend told me they were the Latin American “U2.” The same was true for Caifanes after someone said they were like “The Cure.” While today “Flan” is served with no other description in many Spanish restaurant, I remember my family telling me it was “caramel custard” to get me to try it; and I’m so glad I did. From food, to music, to literature, often it was points of affinity that were made that introduced me to my Latino culture.

Today we see the growth of a new generation of predominately English-speaking Hispanics who are redefining what it means to be Latino. To judge them on their cultural knowledge would be unfair to their upbringing and a strategic mistake. It’s like making someone feel bad because they haven’t heard of Jay-Z, rather than turning on your iPod to make them understand why they should. So when it comes to cultural knowledge as a test of your Latina/o street cred, there really is no fair level. Rather we should have a simple desire and always try to learn more.

“Oye mi amor”- while culture can be taught; it is best when it is shared.

Jose Cruz is a Puerto Rican/Irish multi-city/multi-hat guru at OurTiempo.com. An online entrepreneur, Jose is the in house editor and writer. With a background in politics and a career that includes a law degree, the Clinton White House and managing and developing websites geared at the Latino community, his tastes are as diverse as his work. Just at home diving into a Chicago Deep Dish Pizza to munching on a Fish Taco in East LA. Twitter: @JoseCruz2000

This article first appeared in Our Tiempo.

[Photo by MDCarchives]

My friend and I once argued about the comedic talents of women. Though he is very much a fan of female comedians, he claimed that he knew few funny women in real life. I insisted that he was hanging out with some serious dullards because I knew plenty of funny women, I have hilarious female friends and come from a family that loves to joke. Specifically, one of my aunts is one of the funniest people I know. She is highly skilled in making fun of everyone in a way that is still good-natured. (The most memorable zinger likened someone to the Ku Klux Klan.)

At first I was taken aback by my friend’s claim that there was a dearth of comedic ladies in his life, but then he insisted it was because women are often not expected to be funny, which I can’t really disagree with. And who can forget Christopher Hitchens’ incendiary article, “Why Women Aren’t Funny?,” exploring all the reasons why he claimed we lack a funny bone? While I obviously disagree with most of his claims, I do agree with both Hitchens and my friend that our culture does not encourage women to be funny. Humor is often considered masculine and aggressive, and this is manifested in the disproportionate number of female comedians on TV (especially Latinas). To be funny lady, you must be persistent and not give a flying rat’s butt about these absurd gender norms. You must not care that a joke about your mustache, for example, might make you unattractive to men.

To be Mexican, you must have a good sense of humor about yourself, because our people will not hesitate to tease your physical attributes or flaws. If you’re fat, you can guarantee your family will call you “gordo.” If you’re fat and your best friend is skinny, the two of you together will be called “un diez,” or 10. Here are some other nicknames I’ve heard over the years: “Mal hecho,” “flaco,” “prieta,” “chato,” “pelona,” “chimuela,” “chaparro,” “narizona,” “orejón,” “nalgona,” etc. (all of these make fun of physical characteristics in some way).  I personally have been called a few of these things. And did I develop an eating disorder or a complex about my big nose or my “trompa”? No. I developed a sense of humor.

Also, because I was the only girl, I was (and continue to be) teased constantly by my brothers. The only way to survive is to attempt to surpass my brother’s sharp and well-crafted wisecracks. It’s still difficult. Recently I had the opportunity to call one of them Bob Saget as a result of his corny word choice.

Perhaps another reason I know so many funny women is because I tend to gravitate towards women who are as brazen and inappropriate as I am, women who are confident enough to make jokes at their own expense.  I don’t care much for propriety, and my friends and I, for example, won’t hesitate to make scatological jokes (to my boyfriend’s chagrin) or cracks (hee hee) about male anatomy and other body parts. Ironic jokes about race are also popular. Almost nothing is off limits.

I know that I joke just to survive. If couldn’t make fun of everything, I would rather just lie down and die. Laughing makes life bearable. That’s why I joke about racism and my perpetual fear of being raped. What else can I do? There are so many other women who do the same. Mexican women in particular have made me laugh so hard I’ve cried and nearly (nervous laugh) peed myself. It’s a shame the rest of the world rarely gets to witness their talent.

[Photo By Έλενα Λαγαρία]

Have you ever heard the word, “suave?”

The word is used to mean “smooth” in a variety of contexts, but the usage I wanted to highlight this evening is that it can also mean “cool,” as in “awesome.” Apparently, this usage is pretty well established, too, since my 70-some year-old Mexican relatives use the word in that context, too.

As far as I understand, the word is used across Latino ethnic sub-groups, so if you happen to be a Spanish speaker (native or not) feel free to drop it into conversation!

If you have suggestions for Hablo Y Hablas, words or phrases from your life, feel free to email us at tips@newstaco.com.

[Video And Screenshot By NewsTaco]

This is one of those ideas that I wish I would have thought of myself. It’s also an idea who’s time was inevitably coming. A New York Times opinion column, written by H. Samy Alim, a professor at Stanford University, takes the use of the word “occupy” and turns it on its own axis.

What if we occupied language? it asks. What if we took over the meaning of certain words, to change what they had become out of common usage? Alim cites the word “illegal”; I’d add “anchor baby,” and others.

The question is to the occupy movement what feedback is to microphones and speakers, they’re not meant to come so close. But wouldn’t that be the main reason to do it? Alim talks about how the Occupy Movement has not only changed the meaning of the word, but also changed the framing of the debate:

It has already succeeded in shifting the terms of the debate, taking phrases like “debt-ceiling” and “budget crisis” out of the limelight and putting terms like “inequality” and “greed” squarely in the center. This discursive shift has made it more difficult for Washington to continue to promote the spurious reasons for the financial meltdown and the unequal outcomes it has exposed and further produced.

Where “occupy” used to have a military meaning, it now has a social and political meaning. What if we were to occupy language and take over the meaning of words we find offensive:

Occupy Language might also support the campaign to stop the media from using the word “illegal” to refer to “undocumented” immigrants. From the campaign’s perspective, only inanimate objects and actions are labeled illegal in English; therefore the use of “illegals” to refer to human beings is dehumanizing. The New York Times style book currently asks writers to avoid terms like “illegal alien” and “undocumented,” but says nothing about “illegals.” Yet The Times’ standards editor, Philip B. Corbett, did recently weigh in on this, saying that the term “illegals” has an “unnecessarily pejorative tone” and that “it’s wise to steer clear.”

This is not a new idea. NewsTaco has tackled the issue in the past. What’s new and interesting, to me at least, is the correlation between terms Latinos find offensive, and the world-wide justice movement. Or as Juan Padilla, of the People of Color Working Group , was quoted in the NYT piece:

To occupy means to hold space, and I think a group of anti-capitalists holding space on Wall Street is powerful, but I do wish the NYC movement would change its name to “‘decolonise Wall Street”’ to take into account history, indigenous critiques, people of colour and imperialism… Occupying space is not inherently bad, it’s all about who and how and why. When  white colonizers occupy land, they don’t just sleep there over night, they steal and destroy. When indigenous people occupied Alcatraz Island it was (an act of) protest.

Alim suggests “occupy language” as a transformative movement – to claim a linguistic space, to define what we say:

By occupying language, we can expose how educational, political, and social institutions use language to further marginalize oppressed groups; resist colonizing language practices that elevate certain languages over others; resist attempts to define people with terms rooted in negative stereotypes; and begin to reshape the public discourse about our communities, and about the central role of language in racism and discrimination.

[Photo By occuprint.org]

A great story from The Los Angeles Times this week breaks down the complexity of the Mexican immigrant-powered accent particular to people who grew up near or in the East LA area. Having spent time there and knowing people from there, it seems to me that the story, which is based on interviews with Pitzer College Linguistics Professor Carmen Fought, that a lot of it is spot-on.

Here are a few parts that seemed particularly salient to me:

The tell-tale signs: the drawn-out vowels in the first syllables of his words.

“Together” became “TWO-gether” instead of “tuh-GE-ther.”

Then there’s this:

The East L.A. accent is marked by a higher vowel sound at the end of words, so that “talking” is often pronounced “talk-een.”

Many speakers pronounce the “eh” sound before the letter L as an “ah” — as in “ash” — so that elevator becomes “alavator” and L.A. becomes “all-ay.”

In a slightly Canadian-sounding twist, some people will add “ey” to the end of a sentence, in a vaguely questioning tone: “Someone’s on the phone for you, ey.”

The word “barely” is often used to indicate that something just happened, as in: “I barely got out of the hospital.”

Then there are things like saying “homes” or “watcha,” a regional version of the use of the word “ay” and more I’m sure isn’t documented on the story. What really struck me about this story is how similar this accent is to the way people speak along the border, especially the use of “watcha” and more of an “eh” than an “ey.”

Did this remind you of a place not mentioned here?

[Photo By mistermundo]

Last week I posted on Facebook that, sometimes, people are frustrated by my Spanglish speaking ways. But, that’s the way I think — so ni modo. I got some interesting response and so wanted to explore this topic further.

The truth is that I learned English and Spanish at the same time growing up, after my parents divorced, my mom spoke mostly English to my brother and I, so I lost a lot of the Spanish I knew. When I went to college I was determined to reclaim my bilingualism, and so to this end, I spent my junior year of college studying in Monterrey.

When I came back to the U.S., I found I had temporarily acquired a Regiomontano accent and that many people didn’t understand or were familiar with the Spanish I spoke. Ah, regionalisms. After college when I started working along the U.S.-Mexico border in Brownsville, Texas was really when Spanglish took root in my soul. Up to that point, I had kept the languages mostly separate.

My time in Brownsville was the first time in my life that I realized there was a language between English and Spanish that was spoken just like any other — with established and culturally accepted rules. You don’t just randomly mix two languages together and get Spanglish, rather, certain phrases are more likely to be said in Spanish and others in English; then both mix together and you get Spanglish.

After my time in Brownsville, I found that it was too late to go back — my mind had come to accept Spanglish as the SOP for my world. It’s especially funny, these days in LA, when I bust out in Spanglish and people don’t really get my South Texas Spanglish, but think I’m talking funny. Although I do know how to speak completely either in English or Spanish, this is often easier said than done when I’m in my normal, everyday mode. My brain simply doesn’t distinguish between the languages with a wall anymore: comparable, one might say, to my life and the way my English and Spanish worlds collide.

So, all I ask is a little bit of understanding from people who think it’s “trashy” or “uneducated” to speak in Spanglish. First of all, it’s ignorant for you to make that judgement when you don’t understand how language evolved this way, what’s more, mixing languages this way is pretty much the way language has been evolving since it began gajillions of years ago. Secondly, for those of my friends in LA who don’t “get it,” I’ll try a little harder to learn the LA version of Spanglish.

Although an estimated 2.7 million Facebook users in the U.S. speak Spanish, and 1.6 million use the site en español, not all of the millions and millions of friends of those Spanish speakers understand the language. But Facebook is readying a cure in the form of a “Translate” button. [Click on the image for a larger version]

Case in point: While I was living in South America, my best friend in the U.S. who is fluent in Tagalog and English, once posted this comment on my Facebook profile: ”I wish I could understand all the Spanish on your page lol.”  While she kept track of me through my posted pictures and new friends commenting on my personal page, she often felt slightly frustrated not knowing exactly was going on or what all the “jajajajajas” were about.

This problem may soon be eliminated as the social networking giant has begun to test a new button on certain pages that will allow users to translate comments.  Though still in it’s earliest stages, Inside Facebook reports:

In tests that we and others are now seeing on some parts of the site (only on Pages, at this point), comments in languages other than your account’s current one now include “Translate” button next to them. If you click on the button, the comment is automatically translated to your account language. The Translate button is then replaced by “Original,” which if clicked will untranslate the comment.

Just imagine the linguistic possibilities.  For people with friends in different places around the globe, this tool could open up a new world of dialog between users.   Meaning even if you do speak Spanish and can’t understand this: It will provide some sort of rough translation such as, “And for when the baby? You know, there has to be a party to celebrate,” so that you’ll be one of the first to know when your friend in Chile is pregnant.

Again, it’s still being tested, so there are a lot of details to be worked out, such that slang varies widely within one language from country to country so the translation is not going to be perfect or available all the time.   But it’s still cool to think about how one little button can help bring a lot more people around the world closer to understanding each other.

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Now I’ve written before about how, when I’m speaking Spanish, I’m not talking about you, but what exactly are the things we talk about in Spanish in front of other people? As I’ve said, it’s usually just mundane, boring stuff, for sometimes personal stuff I don’t want other people to know about that a naughty tía decided to ask me at the grocery store.

Or something like that.

Here’s a basic list, now I know I’m missing some, so feel free to chime in:

1. Money. You just don’t want to go around talking about money issues in public all the time; it’s often easier just to mention this part in Spanish if you’re in public.
2. Health. As I said earlier, I try not to talk about health issues in public, but when I have to and I’m speaking to someone who speaks Spanish, I’ll switch over.
3. Chisme. Say you’re talking about one of your primos, you may not want everyone to know the chisme, so you just switch to Spanish.
4. Your life. Sometimes I’ll be out and about doing errands or whatever and I get a call asking what happened Friday night or whatever. You know, it’s really not everyone’s business that I stayed up late watching “NCIS”…plus it sounds kind of more exciting in Spanish.
5. Nothing. Look, some things I’ve found are just better said in Spanish. “N’mbre,” for example is just better than “No way!” At least in my opinion; I just think that for some things Spanish is better and English is better for others. I mean, geez, sometimes my college Portuguese comes up because the verb “ficar” is just such a good verb!

So there you have it. This may not be that exciting as you think — the world revolving around you and strangers going out of their way to notice, form opinions, and then voice those opinions about you may be more exciting — but I swear most of the time I’m just talking about how I lost $20 in my purse or that my cousin is getting married.

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD