Starting Small: Photo Captions

I decided to start with my assigned section for Las Siete Canastas Alimentarias because it included a lot of photo captions, which seemed like a good place to start since they're short. It wasn't long before I found my first stumbling block (and one that continues to cause confusion): food names. Some of these have easy English translations (maíz --> corn), some have translations that might suffice, but they're not well known in their English terms (tumbo --> banana passion fruit), and some don't have a translation at all (chuño --> some sort of a freeze-dried potato?).

One such word that I came across was chicharrón, which is pork, and is something I personally haven't heard of or tried (bottom left photo). WordReference defines it as pork scratching or pork crackling, which both sounded rather odd to me as translations. After the first pass through I decided I would keep it as chicharrón when I handed it off to Brye to read through since it turns out I know quite a few people who know what it is.

Brye is my translating partner and roommate. Shortly after starting this project realized we had walked across the bridge to campus for three straight days while having a conversation about fruit. One such conversation was about nísperos (top right photo). I fell in love with nísperos the moment my host mom in Spain set a bowl of them on the table after lunch one day. I clearly remember taking out my phone and looking up the word in English so that I could try to find them when I returned to the United States, so I knew that they're called loquats (no luck finding them in Minnesota or Wisconsin, by the way).

Overall, starting with the photo captions was a nice way to ease into this project and get a feel for the vocabulary, the content, and the process of translating. ¡Hasta la próxima entrada!