4.1 Where is Sonia going?
"Lost" in translation
Quite often, students of English try to speak, write or understand English by means of translation. So, they tend to believe that if they think of a sentence in Spanish and translate it into English, the result will be correct. Well, forget about that! Very frequently, literal translations are not possible to transfer the meaning of a sentence into another language. What we have to do is to interpret the meaning of a text and produce an equivalent text.
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Important
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Something similar occurs with the Present Continuous in English and some Spanish tenses. For example, in Spanish we say ¿Dónde va Sofía? However, since the action of "going" is occurring at the moment of speaking, the sentence in English is Where is Sofía going? Another example would be a sentence such as Paco lleva puesto un traje nuevo. The action of "wearing" is happening at the moment of speaking, so, the English equivalent would be Paco is wearing a new suit.
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Further knowledge
The same happens the other way round. That is, some Spanish tenses sound as if they were continuous tenses in English. For example, a sentence like No estás entendiendo lo que te quiero decir, in English would be You don't understand what I mean. The reason is that understand is, as we already know, a stative verb. Other examples are:
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- La película me está encantando / I love this film.
- Nos estamos imaginando lo que vas a hacer / We imagine what you're going to do.
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Now that we know the form and uses of the Present Continuous or Progressive tense and the Present Simple, it is time to look into the pronunciation of the third person singular -s/-es of the Simple Present tense. And this is what we are going to do in the following section.