Struggling to resolve what to me is an ambiguity

[graviton]

Hi! I'm brushing up on my pretty-long-ago-acquired Spanish by reading books by Spanish authors and then checking the English versions of those books. Below is a sentence where I have doubts about the translation as it appears in the English version, focused on the word "apuntar", whose meaning I checked in multiple dictionaries. The sentence in question is:

-Cuando es blanca y viene embotellada, suele tratarse de leche -respondió por fin, críptico, mas no tanto como para que el juez no apuntara una sonrisa.

There seem to be two possible translations. One is:" When it's white and comes in a bottle, it tends to be milk", he responded at last, cryptically, but not so much so that the judge didn't note a smile.

So, in this translation the person who makes the cryptic remark about the milk is the smiler.

But here's another interpretation: "“If it’s white and in a bottle, it tends to be milk,”he answered, cryptically, at last, but not so cryptically that the judge didn’t smile slightly.

So the second has the judge doing the smiling, if you interpret "apuntar" as meaning "suggests" or "hints at" which is included among the meanings in the dictionary,

But I'm very unsure of this and would like the guidance of people far more fluent than I: who's doing the smiling, the cryptic one or the judge?

[Julvenzor]

Hi Graviton,

Welcome to the forum. I'm not going to be judge of its English translation, but in the original Spanish I clearly understand it as "suggests" (just as you've mentioned).

The "cryptic one" says ironically that in order to raise a laugh on judge's face.

A pleasure.

[Rusty]

The first is the truer translation, except for the part in question. The cryptic answer is a well-known expression.

So, that would make the judge smile.

[graviton]

Thank you, Julvenzor for welcoming me to the forum--I'm almost embarrassed to admit how delighted I am to be able to learn from a native speaker, especially an intelligent one! I know that many nuances of Spanish language use that escape me will be instantaneously apparent to you, as in this case. Oh, the debate I had with myself, presenting arguments on behalf of each translation of "apuntar"! What a relief having you resolve it!

I hope you will be visiting this forum regularly because I would love to have your input on the interesting linguistic dilemmas I've encountered since my "Spanish relearning project" began a few weeks ago.

Hi Rusty! I found your comment that the first translation is the "truer" one intriguing. Do you mean that "apuntar" would much more often be used to mean "take note of" than "suggest", but that from the context you chose the second meaning?

[Julvenzor]

Dear Graviton,

It's nothing to be grateful about: I'm the first to admit that everything (or most part) I've learnt according to English language has been due to the invaluable labour of altruist users. Yes, I also hope to stay partaking on this forum for a long time. I'm going to travel soon and wish not to suffering any problem with my internet connection.

By the way, I'm 21.

[Rusty]

Originally Posted by graviton

Hi Rusty! I found your comment that the first translation is the "truer" one intriguing. Do you mean that "apuntar" would much more often be used to mean "take note of" than "suggest", but that from the context you chose the second meaning?

By truer, I was talking about the better translation of 'cuando' and 'respondió por fin, críptico'; everything but the translation of apuntar.
I don't think that 'suggest' is the right translation either. I would go with 'break' or 'appear'.

It's possible to have two different English translations, as you have discovered. This is because it's possible that either one of the two men could have smiled. It's even possible that both of them smiled, but only one smile was mentioned.

I think that the key word in the narrative is 'críptico'. The narrative states that the man took a while to respond. When he finally did, his answer was cryptic, it says, but not so much so that the judge couldn't understand it.

What was it that the judge then did?
The translator who gave us the first English version you wrote thought that it was the man who smiled and the judge noticed it. I can see that point of view.
The translator who gave us the second English version you wrote thought that it was the judge who smiled, probably because he recognized the expression being used and thought it witty or funny. I can see that point of view.

I tend to side with Julvenzor, that it was the judge who broke a smile because he thought the expression was funny, or witty. But I can't rule out that perhaps both men smiled. The judge, in that case, would have both presented and noted a smile.

[chileno]

Es el juez el que esbozó una leve sonrisa, porque lo que dijo la otra persona, a pesar de que fue críptico, no lo fue suficientemente críptico para que el el juez lo entendiera y de allí la leve sonrisa.

[graviton]

To Julvenzor: You say “It's nothing to be grateful about: I'm the first to admit that everything (or most part) I've learnt according to English language has been due to the invaluable labour of altruist users.” Exactly, Julvenzor—you're grateful to the altruists who helped you, as I am to the people in this forum who are aiding me. And while I value all contributions, I am especially pleased by those of native speakers of Spanish, and I think the following little story will illustrate why.


I took French in high school, and on the very first day of my very first French class, my teacher, a very elderly lady named Mrs. Burstein, stood in front of the class and said (I paraphrase): “Before we get underway, I want to tell you a story that doesn't make me look very good, or very smart, and in fact it embarrasses me a great deal to tell it to you, but I'm overcoming my embarrassment because it teaches a very important lesson. My whole life, since I was a tiny child, I loved France, and everything French, especially the language. And starting at about age five, entirely on my own, I immersed myself in French culture. But I grew up in a little town in Illinois, about 100 miles south of Chicago, so my French immersion was confined to books and “Learn French in 20 Lessons” language records. There were no native French speakers in Rantoul, Illinois, I can tell you that!! The highlight of my childhood came when, one rainy Saturday, my parents drove me all the way to Chicago to see a French movie that was playing in the US. While that was great, I yearned to hear French spoken in its natural habitat, by ordinary people, not actors. So my lifelong goal was to travel to France, especially Paris. But my family was poor, so that was out of the question when I was a child. Meanwhile, I studied hard, and gradually realized that I was destined to be a teacher of French to Americans. So I majored in French in college, was a straight A student, graduated with honors, and spoke—I thought—perfect French. And the summer after my graduation (scheduled to start teaching French at a school in Chicago in September), I fulfilled my lifelong dream! I flew to Paris, and I remember sitting in the hotel lobby, just listening, for the first time ever, to conversations between ordinary French people! I was in indescribable ecstasy!! I happened to be sitting near the Reservations Desk, and the clerk was constantly on the phone, so naturally I overheard many of his conversations. And suddenly in the midst of all my pleasure, there was a dark shadow. I noticed that the clerk was repeatedly using a word that I had never heard in my life! Never! In conversation after conversation, over and over again I heard him using this word, and despite all my years of studying French and getting the highest marks of anyone in French class, I didn't know what the heck he was saying! After about 15 minutes of this, my curiosity overcame my embarrassment, and I went over to the clerk, and in perfect French I said to him, “Excuse me, sir, but I hear you keep saying this word that sounds like “Dak”, and I have to confess I've never heard it before. Can you tell me what it means?” Well, the clerk looked at me incredulously, and said, “Mademoiselle, you speak such magnificent French, you sound like you were born in Paris, and you ask me what 'dak' means?” When he saw me blushing, he quickly apologized, “I'm so sorry to have embarrassed you, but I was just so surprised. 'Dak' is short for 'd'accord'; we use it like Americans use 'okay'.” So here I was, about to teach French to the kids of Chicago in the fall, and I didn't know how the ordinary Frenchman says 'okay'. Of course I knew 'd'accord', but 'dak' never appeared in any of the books I studied. And that's the point: the French language as taught in books, or in school, and the French language as it is actually spoken by Frenchman are two different things.”


Mrs. Burstein then concluded her story by saying that she was going to try to teach us French as it is actually spoken. And my own point in telling her story is to say that nothing can replace growing up speaking a language, and that's why I place such value on your contributions Julvenzor and those of other native speakers.


To Rusty: I very much appreciated and enjoyed reading your analysis. To give a little context to the quoted sentence: it appears in the opening scene of a mystery novel--the investigators have encountered a dead man hanging from a ceiling lighting fixture in the main room of an exclusive club for serious intellectuals, and the question is: murder or suicide? The judge (who is really an “investigating magistrate”, a distinctly European institution) has just walked over to the police detective and asked him “What do you think?” and the policeman gives the response about the milk that I quoted. The argument in favor of the police detective being the smiler is this: although in saying 'if it's white, and comes in bottles, it's usually milk' the detective is indicating that he's drawing the obvious conclusion, he doesn't say what conclusion appears so obvious to him. But if his words, despite being cryptic, are accompaned by a smile, that smile would indicate he's not taking the matter too seriously—in other words, it's not something awful like murder, but merely a suicide. (And in fact in a moment the reader will learn that that's exactly what the detective thinks.)So, in this interpretation, although the policeman's words are cryptic, his smile makes his overall response less so. So in this way I think the translation does make sense if you have the police detective doing the smiling.


As for the other interpretation, although I know all of you favor it (I noticed that chileno joined the group supporting it), I would ask this question: If the judge smiled because of the humorous way the police detective expressed himself, wouldn't the author have said something like, “...he replied, at last, cryptically, and the judge couldn't help smiling at the detective's colorful words even though he didn't grasp their meaning.”


But Rusty, you might then ask: could the judge have been smiling not because of the amusing figure of speech used by the detective but because in fact the judge did grasp the meaning of the policeman's words, despite their being cryptic? The answer, I think, is no, because in the next few lines you see a very sharp disagreement between the policeman and the judge, with the former believing it was suicide and the latter, murder. So if the judge was able to grasp the policeman's meaning (because, by using such a light-hearted figure of speech, it indicated the policeman must not think a murder had been committed), the judge would most definitely not have been smiling, because it would mean that the two of them were taking diametrically opposed positions in a very serious matter.


Of course, you, Rusty, and Julvenzor and chileno too, did not have all these facts that help put the sentence in context, so you were all operating at a great disadvantage.,

[chileno]

To me, there is no doubt that the judge was the one who smiled.

[AngelicaDeAlquezar]

@Graviton: I'm sorry, but I think you're confused because you're over interpreting a simple sentence. Even without the whole context, the meaning is straight forward, and we all agree that it's the judge who barely smiled.

"Apuntar" in the sense of taking notes is only used when you're actually writing something down on paper, so it doesn't fit the original sentence. The use of "apuntar una sonrisa", in the sense Julvenzor explained, is merely a description of a very faint smile; the sentence is using a figurative way of saying that the immediate reaction of the judge was a faint smile after the policeman made clear that there was something so obvious, that he preferred to express it with a cliché.
The judge is not frankly smiling in agreement, but just reacting to the policeman's joke in an instant.

The adjective "críptico" is only used here because instead of providing a straight answer containing the word "suicide", the policeman is using an obvious word play; it doesn't mean that he wanted to give a hidden message or that the judge wouldn't know what the policeman was talking about.

[graviton]

AngelicaDeAlquezar, thank you for posting your very well-argued point of vew, which I take very seriously. Let me ask you this question: if, instead of using 'apuntar', the author had used 'notar', would you then say that the policeman and not the judge was smiling? Is everything else about the sentence consistent with a “smiling policeman” interpretation, if the verb were 'notar'? And in fact, if the verb were 'notar', would the only interpretation be that the policeman was smiling?

[chileno]

Not "notar" but "anotar" which is the same as "apuntar" in this case.

[graviton]

Hi chileno! I deliberately chose 'notar' and NOT 'anotar' precisely because 'notar' means to 'notice', and doesn't involve writing something down. My question is: if the sentence had been written with 'notar', would you then interpret it to mean that the policeman, and not the judge, was smiling?

[chileno]

That is what Julvenzor and Angélica explained to you.

[AngelicaDeAlquezar]

So I understand this is what you want the sentence to be:

"Cuando es blanca y viene embotellada, suele tratarse de leche -respondió por fin, críptico, mas no tanto como para que el juez no apuntara notara una sonrisa."

Sorry, but this wouldn't make much sense. The word play and the smile should be closely related in the sentence in order to make them belong to the same person, but I fail to see how this "cryptic" sentence would have to be enough as to make the judge note a smile on the policeman's face. What's the relevance of the smile, when the word "críptico" is exclusively referring to the use of a word play? So how can it be related to a smile so far away in the text?


The only way to insert the verb "notar" in there, with the elements of the original sentence, and making the policeman the smiling character, it would be by completely altering the situation.

-...críptico, y el juez, que no entendió nada, notó una sonrisa en el policía.
-...críptico, lo suficiente para desconcertar al juez, quien le notó una sonrisa.
-...críptico, pero el juez, esforzándose por comprender, notó que esbozaba una sonrisa.

[graviton]

This post is for chileno. I see Angelica has just posted a response, which I'll get to next.


Okay, chileno, I just wanted to establish that the only facet of the sentence that makes you interpret it to mean the judge is smiling and not the policeman is the use of 'apuntar'. So then if the use of 'notar' would change the smiler from the judge to the policeman in your view, then the question becomes: can we ever use 'apuntar'—when meaning “to make a note of'—in a figurative sense, even if we usually mean it literally?


The English phrase “to make a note of” is often meant literally, but nonetheless can be used to mean “to make a mental note of” without actually saying the word 'mental'. Is this mental note-taking forbidden with 'apuntar' when it means 'to make a note of'? And bear in mind, human beings are remarkable in the way they say the most concretely literal things, and yet don't mean them literally. For example, if you say to someone you don't trust or like, who wants to borrow money from you, “Write this down! I'm never going to lend you money no matter how many times you ask!” you don't actually mean that he should 'write this down'. And what about differences between Latin American usage of 'apuntar' and European? The writer I quoted is from Spain. So even if, in Latin American Spanish 'apuntar' is NEVER used to mean 'make a mental note of', only literal, physical notes, does that mean figurative liberties are not taken with 'apuntar' by writers on the Continent?


And what about the frequency of usage of the various meanings of apuntar. 'Apuntar' meaning 'to make a note of' I believe occurs vastly more often than 'apuntar' meaning 'to suggest, hint at'. So even if figurative use of 'apuntar' to mean 'make a mental note of' is not common, its frequency might still be greater than the use of 'apuntar' to mean 'suggest'.


And remember, the judge—really an investigating magistrate—may as well be literally writing something down when he makes a mental note of it. He's a very meticulous observer and he carefully files away (mentally) what he's observed—that's an essential characteristic of someone in his profession. So the author might be inclined to use a verb that normally implies physical note-taking when describing the judge's mental note-taking.


And may I point out that 'apuntar' in the sense you want to use it, to mean 'suggest' or 'hint at' is also being used figuratively. Obviously, in your translation of 'apuntar', the judge is not literally suggesting a smile; rather, his face is giving a suggestion of a smile.


So we have a contest between two figurative uses of 'apuntar'. That's a stand-off. But then the argument must shift to the overall context (the details of which I presented in post #8), and in that case I think the weight of the evidence and logic is in favor of a smiling policeman.

[chileno]

This is easy:

In English:

How can I notice, myself, that I am smiling..... because someone else said something sacarstic and maybe I wasn't thinking about it?

See the problem now?
For example in Chile apuntarse/ anotarse un poroto is to get "a score/point", in this case would be something like ".... not cryptic enough for it not to stamp a smile on the judge's face", or something like that.


Would this help you?

Please reason it in English, and the Spanish version will become clearer.

[graviton]

Angelica, you are assuming that 'cryptic' refers exclusively to the words uttered by the policeman. Why? It is, I think, the policeman's entire response that is cryptic, or should I say his entire response is cryptic but with an important qualification—the judge observed a smile on the policeman's face, and that smile lessened the degree to which the policeman's response was cryptic. Why? Because in the context of the scene (see my post #8) a smile on the face of the policeman, combined with the light-heartedness of his comment about the milk, strongly conveyed that the policeman was not taking the matter very seriously, which powerfully suggests that he believed they were dealing with a mere suicide, not a murder. This is confirmed moments later to be exactly what the policeman believes.


And if your interpretation is to be judged the correct one, you would have to be able to answer the points raised in my post #8, which demonstrate the implausibility of the judge smiling in those particular circumstances. If it were simply a matter of the sentence itself, either interpretation would be legitimate. But the sentence in the context of that scene can have, I believe, only one meaning--a smiling policeman.


And Angelica, in your three possible alterations, you don't express what I'm actually saying the state of mind of the judge is. It's not that the judge is totally baffled by the policeman's comment—on the contrary, he correctly infers, based on the light-heartedness of the comment and the smile that accompanied it, that the policeman thinks it's merely a suicide, not a murder

Chileno, I must confess I'm not quite sure what you mean by “How can I notice, myself, that I am smiling..... because someone else said something sacarstic and maybe I wasn't thinking about it?” I'm not saying that under no circumstances could the judge be smiling. Rather, I'm saying that the sentence itself could be interpreted as the judge noticing a smile on the face of the policeman OR the judge himself smiling slightly. From the sentence alone, either possibility is plausible. But when you put the sentence in the context of the entire scene, the scene makes a lot of sense if the policeman is smiling and no sense at all if the judge is smiling. I don't know why everybody is ignoring the context. Context is always the key element in understanding meaning.

[AngelicaDeAlquezar]

As I said before, I think you are overinterpreting a simple situation and although the context helps to refer to the second character (now we know "policeman") and words ("suicide", "murder"), the relationship between both characters is apparent and the reader has a very clear idea of what the sentence says.

So, without any further context, it's plain to see that the one with the cryptical answer is stating he has a concluded business, and the judge is reacting with a smile to a specific instant which doesn't go any farther than the first speaker's reply. It's obvious too that it is not a frank or wide smile because the judge won't show empathy or agreement with the other, for reasons that only he knows. And this is not assuming, but reading what the Spanish sentence is saying.

The adjective "críptico" is addressed to the first speaker, by sarcastically describing his attitude while refusing to utter a straight answer, but using a an obvious word play. Whether he's smiling or not, doesn't add anything.

What I did by altering the sentences was for showing you that there was no way to insert "notar" in that paragraph without having to alter both the relationship of both characters and the situation, so the sentence would be semantically correct. Of course the judge is neither baffled nor confused, but he would have to be if he had to "notice" the other guy's smile.


Finally, I'm sorry to say this, but these sentences cannot mean what you want them to mean. If the extended explanations from four different persons does not satisfy you, I suggest you re-read them again and find the answers you are seeking, for they are all there.

[chileno]

Ok, you quoted the first part of my message. Do I have to assume you didn't see the latter part of it or that it didn;t help you to understand what's going on?

".... not cryptic enough for it not to stamp a smile on the judge's face", or something like that.

Would this particular part be of any help to you?