11:49 Mar 13, 2013
When I read Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy" in Spanish, I noticed that the translator had done an interesting thing: he inserted a footnote explaining a play of words that just didn't work in Spanish. In the novel, some girls refer to boys at the university as "cads." According to Webster's Dictionary, a cad is "a man who acts with deliberate disregard for another's feelings or rights". The dictionary provides two examples: He is a cad, not a gentleman.
and He's the type of cad who readily bad-mouths every girl who's ever dumped him.
Seth wanted to play with the idea that this type of men can also be very tempting, just like chocolate, so he made a wordplay using the concept of cad and the brand name of a popular chocolate - Cadbury's. However "cad" isn't a word in Spanish, which gave the Spanish translator a problem. He solved it this way (my inverse translation of the Spanish): in the text -
In the argot of the female students at the University of Brahmpur, a good-looking boy was a "fresco". The expression came from the brandname for chocolate, Cadbury. footnote - To understand this joke, you need to know that what Malati says (in English) is cad, which means shameless, impudent.
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peer agreement (net): +1