Just when I thought the dark days of US xenophobia couldn’t get any darker, I read that Utah has taken down its Spanish-language Web site.

According to the article, “”Two weeks ago, the state launched www.espanol.utah. gov, a Spanish-language companion to the state’s informational Web site The Spanish-language site offered 10 pages of information on taxes, health services, driver licences, and work-force services selected from the state’s 400-page Web site. But within days, callers complained to the governor’s office that the site violated Utah’s law making English the state’s official language. The Spanish-language site was quickly taken down until its content can be reviewed, said Mower.”

As US companies add Spanish content to their Web sites at a furious pace (Southwest Airlines, Home Depot, Lowe’s), our federal, state, and local governments are going in reverse (or leaning in that direction). In a period of time when Americans should be learning second and third languages, we’re having debates on “protecting” English. How long will it be before WhiteHouse.gov takes down its Spanish content?

These are dark days.

First, here is a picture of the billboard in question:

According to the WSJ, VW was using this billboard to pitch its new GTI to young, bilingual Hispanics. But it appears that the billboard got a little too much attention. Says the article, VW quickly took the billboards down in three cities after they quickly generated a firestorm in Cuban-dominated Miami. “In English, Turbo-Balls might not sound so offensive,” says Luis Perez Tolon, an instructor at Miami-Dade College who supervises a writing program for Spanish-language network, Telemundo. “But in the Spanish-speaking community, it will always have a vulgar connotation.”

Now it could very well be that this result was very much what VW had intended. If the goal is to appeal to the younger set, sometimes offending the older set is the way to do it.

The Spanish-language edition of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is due out next week. Now this begs the question: Which Spanish is it being translated into? According to the press release:

As with the five preceding Potter books, the Spanish-language publisher,
Ediciones Salamandra, will publish three different versions of the same
translation, which reflect the idiomatic differences of the Spanish language
in Spain, Argentina, and the rest of Latin America. The total print run is
expected to exceed one million copies. The popularity of the series is
universal. More than 300 million copies of Harry Potter books in 63 languages
have been sold worldwide.

I have two great articles on the challenges (and business) of translating Harry Potter. Both are free and located here in PDF form:

• Translating Harry Potter – Part I: The Language of Magic
• Translating Harry Potter – Part II: The Business of Magic