The Spanish Language, Alive and Evolving

Every so often we work on projects that put us to the test in trying to stay current with constantly evolving languages.  A while ago, we had had the opportunity to work on an interesting project involving a didactic game for kids, but what would have seemed to be a simple task for most people, started to raise some important questions. So what’s so special about the alphabet? That should be easy to accomplish, shouldn’t it? After all, it is among the first things everyone learns at school. We wish! Perhaps it would be easy if it weren’t for the choices, variety and exceptions to the rules that we speakers seem to be so fond of.

If you were to ask someone in Spain to recite the alphabet for you, and then asked someone from Venezuela to do the same thing, you would notice that, though many of the letters are the same, some were obviously different for each speaker. So what’s right? What is wrong?  What sounds better for your product? As a general rule, in order to determine the most suitable choice, the first step to help narrow down your options would be to determine the region where your product is to be distributed and the audience to which it is targeted. Your translation company will assist you in determining the best approach based on audience and region, so do not hesitate to ask if you feel you are between a rock and a hard place (better safe than sorry).

One would think that the doubts about what alphabet to go with would end there, until the news of a new grammar book and rules hits you. Organizations and academics that determine the correctness of the Spanish language recently suggested new grammatical and spelling rules that go against what was taught at schools in the past to most speakers. It was at the end of 2010, that the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language released a new grammar and orthography guide for the Spanish language. It goes without saying that it has had its share of controversy, extending from well known literary figures to the realm of the social networks. Some of the new suggestions or rules focus on the use of accents for certain homophones or monosyllabic words, when to not use capital letters, and what alphabet letters should be disregarded as such as well as their naming convention, to name a few. For foreign speakers, the safest approach could probably be following the authority’s suggestions, but when linguists remind us that these guidelines are only created thanks to the analysis of the use of the language that native speakers do, one would stop to think twice before using what the academics suggest, particularly when these suggestions encounter such strong opposition based on the idea that such modifications favor some accents over others.

So what are we to do when facing a linguistic transition? Do we go by the book, or by what the speakers say? Chances are, you should try to do your best to follow the book, as long as it does not make your audience feel excluded. Ask your translator for advice on this, and always consider your target audience, as well as the type of content. Products such as electronics, targeted mostly towards younger generations, can benefit from implementing the new grammar rules more smoothly (since these new generations are just now learning it at school), whereas content related to medical insurance might be better received if the text is more in line with the previous linguistic guidelines, since it is usually targeted to an older demographic. If this is still not helping you make a decision, then your most reliable decision should be based solely on you. Ask yourself, what would you like to see if you were in the shoes of your target audience?