Help with translating a (short) book inscription

[kida]

Hola!

I would kindly request if some native or near-native speaker of Spanish could check if the translation of the following book inscription is correct:

To my brother in arms and one wounded of the same battles,
>
A mi hermano de armas y un herido de las mismas batallas,

I think it's quite okay (had Spanish for four years in high school but that's a while ago now ). But I would like to ask a couple of questions for the more experienced speakers here:

- Did I miss any diacritical marks you guys like so much (sometimes)?
- The phrase, 'Brother in arms', of course, comes from the Dire Straits song. On Youtube this song title is often translated as 'Hermanos en armas', but the Spanish Wikipedia seems to suggest 'Hermanos de armas'. Which one sounds better?
- The same goes for the 'wounded of the same battles'. I know you are actually wounded in battle, but English allows a more poetic phrasing with 'of a battle'. Is it the same in Spanish, which version sounds better, 'herido en batalla' or 'herido de batalla'?
- Anything else I messed up?

Basically, I'm unsure about the prepositions, but I'd like to make it sound as poetic as possible, since it is after all, a book inscription (dedication.) Oh and I'm talking about translation into Standard Spanish here, that is, castellano (or that was the name that I was taught in school).

Muchas gracias por toda la ayuda!

[Rusty]

Welcome to the forums!

You've done a great job with the translation. There's nothing I would fix.

The use of 'de' instead of 'en' isn't poetic. It's Spanish.

'Brothers in Arms' is the dictionary entry, but I can see that the singular form is used. There's no doubt that 'Hermanos de armas' and 'Hermano de armas' are the correct translations.

Castilian and Spanish are two names for the same language. The Spanish translation of those words is castellano and español. There are those who argue this point, but it is a fact that Spanish is spoken in 21 countries and is called either castellano or español by those who speak it.

[kida]

Thanks a lot for sharing your expertise and your clarification on castellano and español.

For some reason I thought that mainland Spanish is called castellano and including all it's semi-offsprings throughout the world, generally, it's español. But it was probably just our teacher, who happened to insist on speaking only Spanish during the lessons the whole time from the very beginning, so for quite some time (as complete beginners) we had some minor problems decyphering some explanations. Thank God I knew some French otherwise I could have gotten a nervous breakdown sometimes ...

Gracias de nuevo.

[poli]

The reason why Iberian Spanish is called preferabalbly called Castellano is that there are several offical Spanish languages. They are not dialects but separate languages that include Catalan, Gallego and Basque and a Valencian dialect of Catalan.

[mekdroid]

Originally Posted by poli

The reason why Iberian Spanish is called preferabalbly called Castellano is that there are several offical Spanish languages. They are not dialects but separate languages that include Catalan, Gallego and Basque and a Valencian dialect of Catalan.

Hi there!

In Spain using Castellano instead of Spanish is just a bit of political correctness ... basically the idea is that all the languages of Spain are Spanish, including Basque (an excruciatingly difficult language that is not even in the Indo-European family) so we should use Castilian or Castellano instead of the generic term Spanish. The problem is that in Latin America there is only one type of Spanish (ignoring dialects) so the two are used interchangeably.