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Mostrando las entradas de abril, 2012

Short description of a flaw

Yesterday I was crossing a plaza when suddenly a random phrase crossed my mind: "are you feeling pastrami?". Then, as my native language is spanish (which makes writing in english completely a random thing) , I tried to translate those words. Nothing hard to do, or isn´t? My linguistic crossroad was based in the fact that there's more than a single translation possible. So there I was, in the middle of the plaza and I said -Whoa! wait a minute. Something is not right here. I started to think and I found that the meaning of the phrase depended also on where I put the accent. So it had several meanings in english too, it wasn't a problem in the translation only.  It is not the same to ask putting the accent in "you" than putting it in "feeling"; if I ask "are YOU feeling pastrami?" I can be asking if the person is feeling like a pastrami, maybe that person has a mental disorder. But if i ask "are you FEELING pastrami?"