Spanish Song Parodies

Spanish Song ParodiesWritten By: Janelle Afrasiab, High School Spanish Instructor

Google Translate can be both, a great resource, or a Spanish student’s worse enemy, all in the same sentence-or song.  Recently we watched a couple Spanish music videos that were parodies of popular English songs.  We watched a video of someone who had taken the lyrics to the song Let it Go from the Disney movie Frozen and translated it into other languages, took those translations and translated it back into English.  In what was supposed to be the most inspirational part of the song where she sings “Let it go”, it was translated as “Give up”.  

            Senor Ashby entertained us with his parody of Fergalicious by Fergie.  In his song Gringolicious he illustrated a lot of common mistakes Spanish students make by either using false cognates (words that look the same or similar in Spanish but have VERY different meanings in English) or how Google Translate may not always give you the word you are looking for.  For example if one were to look up “back” on Google Translate, it would tell you that in Spanish it is “espalda”.  However, that’s the word for the body part back and not the word you would use if you wanted to tell someone to sit in the back of the room.  Please, before trying to speak Spanish ask any of the Spanish students what embarazado really means before you try using it yourself.  If not, you may have some explaining to do.