Burn the panties!

You have all been confronted at some point in your life with the difficulty of translating an idiomatic expression, a proverb, a joke. Faced with this great moment of loneliness, the translator can help you. Thus, he will be able to tell you that in Belgium, when you go to a panty burn, you are actually attending a bachelorette party, that in Canada not all young girls are blond, the term “blonde” referring in this country to a girlfriend. In Portugal, the girlfriend is not called “amiga” but “namorada”, because the amiga is not the official, but the mistress, that  “menina” in Portugal,  “mademoiselle” in French, becomes a streetwalker in Brazil.

In the interpretation this is less important, because we do not translate words, but a set of words, an idea.

Nevertheless, both translation and interpretation require a great knowledge of the historical context, culture and, of course, the term. All the more so, when it comes to idiomatic expressions if we want to convey emotions such as irony, sarcasm, etc. 

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