A Goodreads user asked:

Does this book have a lot of unexplained non-English (spanish?) words or am I reading a bad version?

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5 years ago
15 answers

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Tracy Morris Yikes. A "bad" version? I am hoping that was not what you meant. This was a beautiful story, two girls interlaced in two worlds. I thought it flowed beautifully, and I don't know any spanish.

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Evangeline Bad version? I am going to keep my mouth shut.

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Blu Bad version? Do you know how your teacher said there are no bad questions? This is a bad question.

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Alyssa You don’t have a “bad” version. Most non-English phrases are implicit from the context but the ones I wasn’t able to understand, I just looked up.

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Aditya Tawde I'm glad that there were no 'in the bracket' translation. It might have totally lost the original essence and been a distraction.
I'm from India. It took me some while to understand those words, but it did not obstruct the flow of my reading. Also, prior experience with US shows and Latin Telenovelas made it click when I heard 'Mija', 'Dio' 'Negra Bella' etc.

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Erica I don't speak Spanish and I don't think translations were needed. I'm glad they weren't.

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Carie I have my Google translate handy while reading it and look up a word if I feel the need to. Often, you get the idea without actually comprehending all the words. It's a good exercise for our mind!?

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cc It has a lot of untranslated lines, yes. I apologize if this is presumptuous, but I'm assuming based on your name that you are not in the US? Samhita is a lovely name, btw, but not one I'm familiar with! ♥

If I'm correct, it would make extra sense that the language does not make sense to you. The only reason I understood some of the lines without interpretation was because my best friends growing up spoke Spanish as their first language, so the words were mostly familiar to me. I would recommend using a translating app if you're struggling.

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Brok3n Yes, there's a lot of Spanish. Also, quite a lot of the Spanish is informal/colloquial, meaning you can't just look it up. If you understand no Spanish, it will be frustrating to you. Unfortunate, since it is a wonderful book.

It might have been helpful if the publishers had produced a footnoted version for readers who don't know Spanish. But if that exists, I haven't heard of it.

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Shahira8826 Yes, it does. Very frustrating. Every single time a Spanish word or sentence was used, I would have to stop reading and look it up, but that gets tiresome quickly. I think this is the kind of book that doesn't bother being understandable for every reader. This book feels like it's only targeted at bilingual English-Spanish readers.

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Grey Klee "Bad version?" No wonder you asked anonymously, that's... you might wanna get your racism checked.

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Amelia This is an instance of "Spanglish." Many Hispanic/Latinx authors use this as a technique for their works. The author's intentions for this novel were to create a form of identification and relativism for Latinx youth in the U.S. and at the same time, expose the mainstream audience who may be unfamiliar with the Spanish dialect to what many Latinx/Hispanic youth in America feel now: not being understood. I believe this novel does an excellent job of providing an in-depth perspective to people of all cultural backgrounds.
I hope you did not mean bad and simply could not find an appropriate term for not being able to understand the dialect.

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Denise As a Canadian I came across a lot of words and phrases that I didn't know too. I have very little exposure to spanish aside from what comes through American media and books. I thought Tia was someone's name at first (I had a friend named Tia in university). But you can look up the words and learn :) It would have been nice to have footnotes, though, for the longer sentences.

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