Over at Toni Ibàñez, via Carlos Ferrero. A lot to learn–people only say nice things to me.

BCN Week Publisher Jennifer Cross “also soon discovered the value of having sales staff who speak the Catalan dialect of Spanish.” If she thinks Catalan is a dialect of Spanish, then she’s grossly ignorant; if, however, she’s referring to the differences between Catalan Spanish and the standard language, then she’s got the linguistics right and [...]

Liseuse posts on the difficulties of selecting from coffee menus and of translating coffee specialities from German. It would be nice to be able to purchase this kind of stuff in Barcelona–Starbucks don’t do liquor shots, so one boycotts–but first priority for most cafes is to start using decent coffee.

Translator Carlos Ferrero quotes bit of a piece called Aprender a ser libre (Learning to be free) by Jorge Edwards, whose work had the singular distinction of being banned by both the Castro and Pinochet dictatorships:
I recall a Venezuelan poet of Arab origins who was contracting as a translator in North Korea. The documents he [...]