Spanglish won’t cut it for Fremont’s school newspaper
Fremont High School | 4-9-2010 | Comments |
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By Luis Pacheco
When you pick up The Magnet Chronicles, the Fremont Magnet High School newspaper, you might notice that it’s in English. The reason for that is because the majority of our audience reads English. However, it had been brought to our attention that several Spanish speaking students and their parents were interested in reading the paper. For that reason we, The Magnet Chronicles, made it our goal to produce a Spanish edition last semester.
When the class decided to do the Spanish edition everyone said, “This is going to be a piece of pastel (cake),” but we were wrong.
We underestimated the work load that would come from this challenge.
Not a week had gone by when writers began asking, “Does this make sense?” or “How do you say this in Spanish?” But this was only the beginning of what soon became total chaos.
Not only were there words misspelled and accents missing, but the content was inaccurate too. The thing was that the writers translated the articles word for word instead of rewriting the intended meaning in Spanish.
This was quite embarrassing considering the fact that we thought because we grew up in Spanish speaking homes, we would easily produce a Spanish paper.
We felt embarrassed to call ourselves bilingual when we received the corrections covered in red marks from the Spanish teachers who were helping us edit. There were too many corrections to make and too little time. In the end we felt so discouraged that we decided to save the Spanish issue for another time.
When you have spent so much time in school, where you speak English all day and then go home to have conversations in the broken Spanish that only your parents have learned to decipher, there is very little opportunity to speak or write proper Spanish.
Many of us have even given up practicing Spanish at home or with Spanish speaking friends and nobody corrects us when we misuse words or worse make them up, like the ever famous “parquiar”– to park and “lonche” – lunch. We may call this our own special language but when you’re trying to print a newspaper in Spanish, Spanglish won’t cut it.
Tags: bilingual english fremont high school journalism school spanglish spanish student journalism the magnet chronicles