10512: Jeff Kling Loves Spanish Women…?

Adweek interviewed new Fallon Chief Creative Officer Jeff Kling, who expressed reverence for Cecilia Giménez:

Why the fascination with Cecilia Giménez, the elderly woman who was in the news for destroying the Spanish church fresco?

Her restoration attempt required a lot more than idle good intentions. She brought reverence, devotion and probably love to a sincere effort to restore this work. She’s north of 80 and she got paint on her hands. How many 30-year-olds follow through on casual plans for the evening, let alone make good on their creative ambitions? She invests herself totally and gets smacked for it. I hope she knows her humanity is beautiful. Her act edifies us like art seldom does, and I hope Jesus has her back. I want to hug her.

Okay, but would Kling hire an 80-year-old Spanish woman? Get real. Kling would sooner hand a job to Colonel Klink.

7983: Beer Advertisers Slurring In Spanish.

From The New York Post…

It’s Spanglish lite

By Ana Maria Ariza Buitrago

Beer companies must think Spanish-speaking people are already drunk when they are watching their advertisements.

That has to be why they’ve decided to mangle this beautiful Romance language and talk down to the 58 million Hispanics who might want a brew or two.

It’s worse than the mauling they give English—“drinkability,” after all, isn’t a word, although Budweiser has made it the slogan of an entire advertising campaign.

Spanish-speaking beer drinkers aren’t so flexible, and few seem to find humor in indecipherable word play and just plain bad translations.

In Spanish, Budweiser’s catchphrase is “tomabilidad”—which is a neologism like “drinkability” but doesn’t make as much sense.

Corona, which is headquartered in Mexico—where Spanish is obviously the primary language—tells beer drinkers to “Más una fría que beer.” Maybe they’re trying to say it’s “the coldest beer,” but the translation is closer to “More one cold what beer.”

Talking to a group of Spanish speakers, including Prof. Gerardo Piña-Rosales, president of the American Association of the Spanish Language, found that no one really understood what it meant.

Nor did anyone understand Coors Light’s phrase “Emborícuate.”

As best anyone can tell, the company and its ad agency tried to merge the words drunk in Spanish—borracho—and Borícua, which is a way people from Puerto Rico are described.

Why those two words were joined is anyone’s guess. Coors Light and the other beer companies didn’t return phone calls.

Michenelle Groller who is a Spanish teacher in Brooklyn said, “these ads are not only misleading, but mostly offensive.”

“These advertisements are approved or looked upon as OK because they are written in a different language. If they were written in English they would have never made it past the planning stages,” she added.

Piña-Rosales says that instead of picking qualified translators, companies seem to randomly select less-capable individuals who can’t get the job done. “The beer advertisement is just one of the multiple examples I see daily.”

There are plenty of instances in the past of American companies butchering the Spanish language.

One of the most famous cases was when Chevrolet marketed its Nova car in Spanish-speaking countries without changing the name. Nova in Spanish unfortunately means “no go.”

“This is something that we as Spanish speakers have to fight against,” Piña-Rosales said.

Opponents of this misuse of Spanish say companies are encouraging the spread of Spanglish, and changing words to fit their needs.

“Although I was born here in the US, I find these ads demeaning to the Spanish language,” said Kristina Puga, a consumer in Jamaica, Queens who is fluent in both languages. “I never liked the taste of these beers and now I like them even less.”

Daniel Fernandez, a member of the American Association of the Spanish Language, thinks that the advertising agencies should reach out more to native speakers. “Unfortunately, they don’t look for our opinion. They’re not only promoting beers, they’re promoting bad Spanish.”

Not on tap
Spanish language advocates are “muy caliente” with brewers of their Latin ad campaigns.

• Tomabilidad: Bud ad speak for drinkability. No such word in Spanish.

• Más una fría que beer: Corona’s ad line, which translates into: “More one cold what beer” Huh?

• Emborícuate: Native speakers are at a loss of what this Coors Light phrase means.

6517: Talking The Talk.

From The New York Times…

NY Mayor Hones Spanish Skills to Woo Latino Voters

By The Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) -- For a long time, it was hard to get Mayor Michael Bloomberg to say more than a few words in Spanish. Today, as his bid for a third term as mayor gets off the ground, he can’t seem to stop.

The billionaire businessman has been studying Spanish since his first run for mayor, and he had mostly limited his public utterances to a few phrases and greetings here and there.

But now, with more and more Latino voters in New York City, along with higher-rated Spanish-language news broadcasts, Bloomberg is looking for more ways to be heard despite his inelegant accent and clumsy verb conjugations.

He now concludes every news conference by summing up the main points and taking some questions in Spanish, and at two recent events—a snowstorm briefing and women’s luncheon—he answered reporters’ questions in Spanish without any help.

The responses were sometimes filled with awkward phrases like “the streets have cleaned” and “it was a lot of windy,” but he’s willing to try.

At the beginning of 2007, about 676,000 of the city’s 3.8 million registered voters were Latino. Now, that number has grown to more than 860,000 out of the total of more than 4.2 million, according to Voter Contact Services, which processes voter files.

“It’s a group that all the campaigns will be going for,” said Jerry Skurnik, a political consultant and expert on voter data.

However, campaign strategists say there is no such thing as one Latino voting bloc in New York City, with its large numbers of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Ecuadorans, Colombians and Mexicans, along with many smaller communities.

Bloomberg isn’t the only one working on a bilingual campaign.

The two leading Democratic mayoral hopefuls, Comptroller William Thompson Jr. and Rep. Anthony Weiner, both speak conversational Spanish occasionally at public events and with Spanish-language media, and have taken lessons to keep up their skills.

Bloomberg aides say his decision to summarize his public events in Spanish, and to speak it more regularly, grew out of discussions last fall, with an eye to getting attention on the rapidly growing Spanish media in New York City.

The 6 p.m. newscast on WXTV, the Spanish-speaking Univision affiliate, eclipsed its English competitors on the ABC, CBS and NBC stations in popularity last year among viewers younger than 49, according to Nielsen Media Research.

The first time Bloomberg ran for City Hall, his campaign let it slip out that he had started learning Spanish, and his tutor sometimes accompanied him to campaign events. Bloomberg could manage only greetings and pleasantries, but it was enough to show he was making an effort.

That year, he won roughly one-third of the Latino vote.

For his re-election bid in 2005, Bloomberg’s campaign made a big show of releasing its first television ad in Spanish. By then, he was also comfortable enough to occasionally speak a few words in public, despite his mispronunciations and awkward accent.

He won less of the Latino vote that year—about one-fourth—but he was facing an opponent of Puerto Rican descent who had an established base of Latino support.

After winning re-election, Bloomberg kept up his lessons and occasional bilingual public displays, surprising many people during a trip to Mexico in 2007 when he conducted a news conference in both languages, without help from a translator.

And last week, for the first time, he began a local news conference in Spanish as he stood with the city’s police commissioner to announce an arrest in an alleged hate crime killing of an Ecuadoran immigrant.

Yet with all his practice, including regular tutoring and lessons on an iPod, Bloomberg still demonstrates only a basic grasp of the language at best, as evidenced by his clumsy phrases during last Monday’s snowstorm briefing.

And his accent is still widely considered to be awful.

“Before I die, I am going to accomplish this,” the 67-year-old mayor said last week. “Although it’s a race, I will say that.”