Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Spanish Banalities Do Not Equal American Irony

Deadspin has this odd habit of translating random words in posts that have to do with soccer or Latin America into Spanish. Often, this appears to be the punchline of the joke that wouldn't exist were it not for the random translation. Behold:
Emma Carmichael, writing about a crotch-foul on Dos Santos the other night, writes, "May they leave los penes en paz."

Brian Hickey on the Quito hooker scandal, reports that "eight members of the team were sent home amid an ¡escándalo delicioso!"

Hickey again chuckles over the Copa América announcer's "pasión for Budweiser, the Rey de Cervezas."
These were all in the past week, and I am not an every-post reader of Deadspin. In small doses, I wouldn't notice, but day after day, it's rather irritating.

2 comments:

jd said...

I'm a Deadspin apologist, but you're right, that's the type of lazy humor the commenters claim to disdain (but don't call out from the writers). That said, there's certainly a comedic tradition of regarding a random nugget of Spanish as funny. The example par excellence, of course, is Bumblebee Man on The Simpsons. Picture the Hickey phrases in that exasperated ay-dios-mio Bumblebee Man tone and you can kinda sorta see where he was coming from. Emma's is just lame though.

pc said...

Yeah you're right, I thought about that as I was writing it trying to hammer down what is the part of it I find disagreeable. I think it's just the frequency of it that is annoying. Bumblebee Man appeared only so often in the Simpsons. Though maybe knowing Spanish now is a key part of the equation--would the same gags in French or Chinese be funny, or funnier? Not sure.