In my almost 20 years of work as an ATA-certified technical translator, I am often asked if I will ensure that the target language of a document conforms to the Spanish as spoken in, for example, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba or Argentina. One glance at the tools bar in WORD under “select language” and you’ll find that nearly every Spanish-speaking country is included as an option for spelling and grammar checks. Likewise, in the select language feature in WORD, English comes in different flavors. In addition to the US, England, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, etc., are listed.
The desire to regionalize is motivated by a number of factors. Certainly, cultural sensitivity and inclusion, those watchwords of political correctness, are often lurking somewhere in a client’s mind, as well as practical concerns.
There are two questions at the heart of regionalization. The first is: “Will all speakers of Spanish understand my document if I don’t regionalize it?” The second is: “Isn’t Spanish different from country to country?” The answer to both these questions is “it depends.” Unlike English, Spanish is one language in terms of orthography and grammar. As with all languages with a wide geographical and geopolitical diffusion, the vocabulary of Spanish varies, as do pronunciations.
A lot of time will be wasted if one thinks it necessary to regionalize medical documents written for Spanish-speaking doctors, technical manuals for electronics, package inserts for prescription drugs and ingredients on a food product. Documents written for the general, non-specialist public, are the ones for whom regionalization is most often justified. Thus, informational brochures about venereal disease to be placed in clinics, advertisements for electronic equipment to be placed in a newspaper or on TV, instructions and warnings to patients about drug interactions or cookbooks all would be good candidates for regionalization. Generally speaking, financial lingo is stable in the Spanish-speaking world. Computer lingo is in constant flux. On the other hand, for some languages, such as Tagalog, there is almost no native vocabulary for dealing with high finance and computer lingo finds its way via Taglish (a very creative and idiosyncratic combination of English and Tagalog).
When considering whether a document should be regionalized, a client should ask him or herself whether they think regionalizing it for different regions of the US would add value. If not, they can usually bet that regionalizing it for the Spanish-speaking world would probably be a waste of time and money. The most glaring exception to this is in the world of marketing and advertising. It almost always is a good idea to put time, research and talents to work in order to appeal to various micro markets.