RadioLingual: an audio blog found in translation
   

Thursday, March 26, 2009

When will they give me bilingual texting?

I used to live in El Paso, Texas, which, paired with Ciudad Juárez, straddles the U.S.-Mexico border. While most people there speak English and/or Spanish fluently, everyone speaks Spanglish, and I became one of those people. Speaking Spanglish was often fun for me, as I got to play with the words of two languages, but it could also be frustrating on occasion, as I use predictive (T9) text messaging, which is impossible when writing in two languages simultaneously.
For example, here's what happens if you have your predictive text set to English, and you have a text conversation with a friend in Spanglish.

Friend: Hey innard, what you up to this taped?
(Hey hombre, what you up to this tarde? = Hey man, what you up to this afternoon?)
Me: Track
(Trabajo = Work)
Friend: No names hue
(No mames guey = Give me a break punk)
Me: Km pheno amigo. Let's get together mananc.
(Lo siento amigo. Let's get together mañana = Sorry friend. Let's get together tomorrow.)

Anyway, you get the gist. And the thing is, sometimes you just wanna speak Spanglish. Like, for instance, "give me a break punk" is a terrible translation for "no mames guey," but I can't think of a good one, which is why I, and many others, would want to say it in Spanish.

So there you have it. I figure it's only a matter of time before one of the cell-phone companies offers bilingual texting, and I hope they hurry up and do it. That day will be, one might say, super chido!

1 Comments:

At June 25, 2009 at 5:23 AM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://www.nuance.com/t9/textinput/

 

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