Cybernauts, Translators and Makers of Gestures I

Part One: On the Internet

Last week we were talking a little about digital illiteracy and its consequences in the everyday lives of Spanish teachers.

One thing that’s important to keep in mind is that problems can be caused by the assumption made by some that all the information that appears on the internet is credible and accurate. It’s the same mistake people used to make in years past when they assumed that if something was printed on paper than it must be true. It seems that the popular misconception about paper has shifted to the computer screen in all its sizes models and formats. If it’s on the internet, then it must be true.

Unfortunately this is not the case. We often stumble across mistakes of varying degrees of severity that have slipped past the documents’ authors, likely without any intention of purposely distorting reality. Also, the oh-so-easy cut and paste operation made available by technology has meant that less time is being spent on thinking about the meaning of the content –or even understanding it –just because there’s no need to because the work is already done for us.

As a result, we can observe some pretty striking examples of butchered language when working with students at the advanced-intermediate level (let’s say, B2 or higher). We also see the strong influence of Spanglish, possibly the reason for the disappearance of punctuation marks that open statements of exclaim and questions (¡?), marks that are important in Spanish since we don’t have a special syntactic structure for these situations like they do in other languages. Other punctuation marks are also getting lost, which means that readers are left more and more to infer meaning based on context, which isn’t always enough, from here we see the importance of comas, periods, etc.

Not only that, we’re also losing H’s and accent marks, and other elements that are fundamental to written communication in Spanish. How else would you mark the difference between allá / haya / halla without accents and H’s? How would you repeat the sentence, that all students from my generation had to listen to in Spanish class “Ahí hay un hombre que dice: ¡ay!”? How would you show the difference between porque / por qué / porqué?

When we Spaniards study English, when we speak it, sometimes “funny” moments arise when we incorrectly pronounce the words "beach" and "sheet" with a short i sound. And it’s good that these things happen. The speaker-learner of a language, after having reached a certain level of independence with the language, should notice and consider these “minor” issues. Because in the end, they are just as important for effective communication as correctly using the Pluscuamperfecto de Subjuntivo en una oración condicional hipotética imposible.