4.1 Where is Sonia going?
"Lost" in translation
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Quite often, students of English try to speak, write or understand English by means of translation. So, they tend to believe that if they think of a sentence in Spanish and translate it into English, the result will be correct. Well, forget about that! Very frequently, literal translations are not possible to transfer the meaning of a sentence into another language. What we have to do is to interpret the meaning of a text and produce an equivalent text.
Click on the video on the right to have a look at some funny signs found out around the world.
Important
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Something similar occurs with the Present Continuous in English and some Spanish tenses. For example, in Spanish we say ¿Dónde va Sofía?However, since the action of "going" is occurring at the moment of speaking, the sentence in English isWhere is Sofía going? Another example would be a sentence such as Paco lleva puesto un traje nuevo. The action of "wearing" is happening at the moment of speaking, so, the English equivalent would be Paco is wearing a new suit.
Although it is not a translation course. Let's see if you have understood that when the action occurs at the moment of speaking we use the Present Continuous or Progressive tense in English; although in Spanish the Presente de Indicativo is used.
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| By Mark Kobayashi-Hillary. C. Commons |
Guess the correct translation of these Spanish sentences.
1. ¿Qué haces ahora?
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What do you do now?
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What are you doing now?
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I don't know why you are eating that banana just before breakfast.
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I don't know why you eat that banana just before breakfast.
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Where are you going on Monday afternoons?
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Where do you go on Sunday afternoons?
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Further knowledge
The same happens the other way round. That is, some Spanish tenses sound as if they were continuous tenses in English. For example, a sentence like No estás entendiendo lo que te quiero decir, in English would be You don't understand what I mean. The reason is that understand is, as we already know, a stative verb. Other examples are:
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| By Andy Zeigert. C. Commons |
- La película me está encantando / I love this film.
- Nos estamos imaginando lo que vas a hacer / We imagine what you're going to do.
- For further information on this subject, click here. By clicking here you will also find useful information about it.
Now that we know the form and uses of the Present Continuous or Progressive tense and the Present Simple, it is time to look into the pronunciation of the third person singular -s/-es of the Simple Present tense. And this is what we are going to do in the following section.