A Great Discord / Un gran desacuerdo

Just as there is much political discord in Washington DC, translators also cannot agree on the new U.S. president’s famous slogan: Make America Great Again.

According to an article (in Spanish) in Spain’s newspaper El País, translators have not reached consensus on a translation. (See this article in English). Here are a couple tries from some high-profile translators:

Que América vuelva a ser grande
Haz América grande otra vez
Hagamos que América vuelva a ser grande
Devolvámosle a los Estados Unidos su grandeza
Rehacer la grandeza de América
Hagamos América grande de nuevo
¡Arriba América!

Why is this so difficult, you may ask? There is a lot going on in the phrase. For example, who should the subject of “Make” be? Is it “Let’s Make?” “You make?” A general “Make?” Should it use the subjunctive? Should the translator try to keep it short so that it can be printed easily on hats and print materials? The questions go on.

Translating slogans is not always simple. Obama’s “Yes, we can!” was translated as “¡Sí, se puede!” This removed the “we” from the slogan and used the more general “Yes, one can!” But that slogan has a history in Spanish that dates from the farm workers’ movement of the 1970s, so it made the task easier.

Many think that to be a translator one only needs to be bilingual. This is not true; translation is an art and one must possess a high level of both linguistic and cultural knowledge to perform it accurately. As you can see by this case, only a skilled translator can make a translation great.