Thriving in a globalized environment like the one the majority of us live in today, we become obligated to communicate in distinct languages. Many individuals and companies conduct personal and business transactions by having their documents, presentations or websites translated in their desired language/s.
One way to bridge a potential communication gap is by ensuring that the content of the message is not only correctly translated from one language to another but, most importantly, by taking into account that the most accurate orthography is implemented. One of the most common language pair requests that we receive for translation is from English to Spanish and Spanish to English.
We continue to successfully facilitate these needs by ensuring that highly qualified and experienced professionals carry out the required translation. Working with these resources allows a high level of accuracy to be maintained especially when translating into the Spanish language.
In general, Spanish uses mostly the acute accent mark, and it is usually placed over vowels. Precise attention, knowledge and experience is a key factor when accentuating words in Spanish because there are many words that are spelt the exact same way and an accent gives them a completely different meaning.
For example:
“Aun” means “even” as an adverb and “Aún” means “yet” or “still”.
“Como” means “as” or “like”, and it is also a tense of the verb “to eat”, while “Cómo” is used in a question and means “How”.
“Que” means “that” as a conjunction, and “Qué” means “What…” when used in questions.
“Mi” as a possesive pronoun/adjective means “my” (as in “my casa/my house”) and “mí” means “me” as a simple pronoun.
“Papa” means “potato” or “Pope” (la papa = the potato; el Papa = the Pope), and “papá” means “dad”.
Besides, there are just a few other accent marks. For example for the alphabetical letter “ñ”. The mark above the ñ is referrered to as a “tilde” which is used in words like “mañana” which means tomorrow in English. Also, a “diéresis” refers to the two dots sometimes used and placed above the vowel “u” (ü) when followed by the vowels “e” or “i” and whenever you want that “u” to be pronounced (e.g., in words like “agüero”, which means omen).
One accent can make a drastic difference in the context of one word, phrase, sentence, needless to mention that it simply will not make sense once incorrectly used.
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