If you are not living in your native country but in one where the language is totally different (because South Americans in Spain a fortunate – they  don’t have to learn the Spanish language), you will know what I am talking about. The mix.

I was born and raised in Germany (near Cologne) and my family is German.. I came to Spain eighteen years ago through the big US toy company where I was working in Cologne, Germany and who was launching the Spanish TRU stores in Madrid, Spain.

Living in Spain, speaking Spanish every day makes it happen that, sometimes when I visit my family in Germany I answer them with “sí or no” instead of “ja or nein”. I hope you are getting what I mean as this article is in English.

In order to drive the point home let’s create a case in your office:

You have a conversation in Spanish with a Spanish colleague, while answering an email in English to a supplier in the USA and you have to tell a Spanish colleague, between the conversation and the email,  the German translation of a Spanish technical term ?

My experience is that the outcome depends on your daily fitness (mental and physical).

Here are some examples of what can happen:

You are fit and focussed and you slept well: Fine. Your conversation in Spanish will flow normally, the email in English will be good and the German word you tell your Spanish colleague will be totally correct.

You got up a little tired and your concentration is not running smoothly:
Medium. You will stare some seconds at your partner in conversation before you answer him in Spanish. Your English email will have some Spanish words in it (like “y” instead of “and” or “o” instead of “or” – if you know what I mean, and the ending of the German translation you throw at your Spanish colleague between conversation and email will be wrong, like “Track-ing instead of Trac-tion”. You will notice that something is not right but you are not able to capture it.

You had a long, heavy dinner, slept badly, light nightmares and you beat the alarm clock when it rang at 06.30:
Bad. Your will answer in Spanish but late and with a very heavy accent. The English email will consist of tlx abbrevs like pls, thks, doc., etc. . The translation of the technical term from Spanish to German will be for the bin.

You slept badly and finally overslept (the alarm clock was on strike), got up late, no breakfast, producing psychological stress and bad conscience:
Worse. You will give a kind of answer in Spanglish, the English email will have to wait and no translation service today, sorry. Meanwhile YOUR THOUGHTS are spinning in different languages, also in some you don’t even know. The day is cloudy and you prefer not to answer the phone.

Well, I think I drove the point home.

The words speakwrite and doublethink in the title are taken from George Orwell’s novel 1984 and I changed their meanings because I liked the words. In “1984” the speakwrite it is a kind of dictaphone Winston Smith uses to rewrite Big Brother’s newspaper articles. And doublethink is to think one way and to act according to Big Brother’s rules.

 I think I will write a review of the book with the lovely vocabulary . The novel’s content is really scary but the words are amazing, like speakwrite, newspeak, doublethink, oldspeak, bellyfeel and a lot more.