English Translation:
Cat: Do you have a cat?
Girl: No.
Cat: Now you have one!
Girl: And that's how I got a cat.
this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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The translation is precise, but for some reason it doesn't carry the same degree of humor. I think it may have to do with the way Spanish handles the indefinite article "a cat."
Edit: ok, that might be part of it, but there's also the way he tells her that she now has a cat. The word-for-word translation differs slightly in meaning from the figurative translation. There's something that's lost, maybe a degree of finality?
I think "You do now." probably works better than "Now you have one!" It feels more threatening.
(Disclaimer: I'm a native speaker or neither English nor Spanish.)
And the first panel: "Got a cat?"
Or even "Got cat?"
To your point, maybe a better translation for the third panel would be “you do now.”
I would have translated better without the "a" to make it wrong and same level of absurd.
one of my friends loves to say "oh my gatos!" instead of "oh my god"
and when you hear that coming from this 6'2 tatoo'd and dreadlocked brute, it always makes me giggle
Recently learned that this is called a minced oath.
I'm Spaniard and it sounds weird in Spanish, so much that I thought it was some auto translation bot. The humor is still there and it's easy to get eve it is sounds weird.
Alright, now I'm curious. I was responding from the perspective of an English speaker who reads and understands Spanish.
What do you find strange in the Spanish version? How would you express these lines more naturally?
"un gato", it's missing the word "a" in "a cat", which makes it sound wrong and funnier in spanish than if it'd be written well
Like I said, I'm not a native speaker. However, I was taught that the indefinite article is often omitted in this type of sentence to avoid confusion between an and one.
In other words "¿Tienes carro?" and "Tiene novio." still mean "do you have a car?" and "she has a boyfriend" even without the articles.
you're right of course, and for me the first panel the sentence sounds correct, but not the last one, where she's already refering to her cat which is a cat like "gato" only. Maybe not the same asking if you have any car, any boyfriend or any cat as opposed to saying that now you have a cat, which should go with the "a" before. Unless the cat is called "Cat" 😅
I'm not a linguistic and cannot argue the why properly, but the sentence in last panel is definitely off
Yo visito Barcelona en 2008 y (como se dice "stayed") en Hostel Urbany.
Yo me gusto mucho y amo gelato!
I know just enough Spanish to read the whole joke before reading the translation. I agree, going for fewer shorter words makes it concise and funnier.
I make the same point to weaboos that insist on literal translation from Japanese. Sometimes just rewriting a phrase is a better option to carry the literary quality.
Why not say “And now i have pussy” way more funny and ironic.
I honestly thought that was the joke