My friend Fabby emailed me these directly from the La Guardia Airport the other day. As a native Spanish speaker, and a translator to boot, she was appalled by the basic Spanish translation mistakes here. It’s incredible that with SO many Spanish speakers in the United States, errors such as these still abound. It’s shameful really.
This could be a bit tricky for some people. One of the mistakes may not be so obvious. You definitely need an in-depth understanding of Spanish to answer this post correctly.
2 Spanish Language Translation at La Guardia Airport
In the Baggage Claim photo, the word equipajes is incorrect. The word only exists without the S, in spite of what some information says on the internet. According to the Real Academia Española there is no entry in the dictionary for equipajes. The English equivalent to this error is the word baggages instead of the correct word baggage.
The second error here is the translation of concourse as concurso. This word pair is described as false friends because although they appear to be the same word, they are in fact words with two different meanings. The English concourse refers to a wing or section of an area while the Spanish concurso is any type of contest.
On a special note: Natalia, our expert from Spain says that equipajes, with the S, is common and acceptable there.
What has your experience been?
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