In Spain there is a widespread belief that Italian is an easy language to learn. The same is true in Italy, where people generally assume that learning Spanish is no great task: the two languages are close enough that speakers can usually understand each other without much effort.
Is it easier to translate between related languages?
Does this mean that working as a translator between closely related languages is easier? Not at all.
That apparent ease is, in fact, the translator's worst enemy. The closeness of Italian and Spanish brings with it, among other things, the risk of linguistic interference and the traps set by false friends: those words that look or sound the same in two languages but carry partially or entirely different meanings.
The trap of similarity
Once you look closely at these cases, you realise that the language you thought was "easy" is not — and that what looked similar may not be all that similar either.
That is why translation between related languages, as in the Italian-Spanish pair, is no easy task. It calls for rigorous contrastive analysis and a solid command of both languages if serious errors of comprehension and translation are to be avoided.
When the languages belong to the same family — Romance languages, in this case, and even more so Italian and Spanish — contrastive analysis across the various linguistic fields becomes essential, because the greater the similarity between two languages, the harder it is to capture every nuance.
Edmondo De Amicis and the difficulty of Spanish for Italians
As the Italian writer Edmondo De Amicis put it:
"Spanish is by no means an easy language for Italians. On the contrary, it presents the great difficulty of easy languages […] We slip back into Italian without realising it, we invert the syntax at every turn, we constantly have our own language in our ears and on our lips — it makes us stumble, it confuses us, it betrays us…"
The writer's words sum up some of the difficulties a translator of related languages faces — work that is in no way simpler than that of any other translator.
The technical dimension: legal translation
These difficulties multiply when we move to legal translation between Italian and Spanish, where terminological nuance can carry legal consequences.
We have explored this in more depth in Italian-Spanish legal translation: difficulties and considerations.
Need a sworn Italian-Spanish translation?
At Textualia we also handle sworn translation projects from Italian into Spanish. Although our main pairs are English and French into Spanish, we have the expertise and the resources to offer you a professional Italian service. Write to us at info@textualia.com or via WhatsApp on +34 646 07 68 54 and we will put together a tailored quote.