Mind your language
PITY the poor translator, and they often are poor, getting bad pay and little thanks. The difficulty of the task came home to me when I was in Spain for that medical conference that my hus- band was attending. While he was talk- ing with his chums about liver failure or whatever, I was in a bar with a French friend. She asked me what was in an off- white bottle labelled 7-lorchata de chufa'. Now, I didn't know the English for horchata de chufa, let alone the French.
My little pocket Collins said chufa was 'the tuber of a kind of sedge'; for horchata it had 'orgeat'. What?
Back home I looked up the phrase in various dictionaries. Most agreed that horchata was a refreshing drink. Neu- man's Spanish-English dictionary (1802) said it was made out of melon or pump- kin seeds; Bensley's (1896) says it might also be made from almonds; Collins Concise (1985) merely says 'almond milk'.
Actually, horchata can even be regarded as an English word. Murray did not record it in the volume H—K of the NED that came out in 1901, but the second edition of the OED has it. Though in its definition it says it is made from chufa, the first citation (from 1859) specifies almonds.
Chufa has as good a claim to be an English word, being recorded by Mur- ray, if only in American use. It is 'the Earth Almond (Cyperus esculentus), a plant producing a tuber the size of a bean'. The OED even gives the French for it: souchet comestible or amande de terre.
But it was only when I turned to the latest edition of the pocket Collins Spanish-English that comprehension dawned: 'the tiger nut', it said. Aha! I never liked the things myself, but Veronica has been known to crunch the odd packet.
But if I were a translator I think I would render horchata de chufa as hor- chata de chufa.
Dot Wordsworth
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