This site uses cookies.
Some of these cookies are essential to the operation of the site,
while others help to improve your experience by providing insights into how the site is being used.
For more information, please see the ProZ.com privacy policy.
Spanish to English translations [PRO] Art/Literary - Journalism / Fotoreportage
Spanish term or phrase:vivienda digna
Appears throughout the text (footers of a photo report about the impact of mass tourism in Barcelona). Context: due to tourism, rent levels for the locals are rising, tenants suffer real estate mobbing, etc.) I translated the term as "decent housing" because that is how it is usually translated, however the client wants a more literal translation. He proposes "worthy housing" but I don't believe anybody would even get the meaning of that term... any ideas? The only other term that occurs to me is "adequate housing", but that's even further away from "digno" than "decent".
Good news. In the end my client accepted the term "decent". Now I don't know who should get the points for the best answer, they were all helpful, really.
What about “to live in dignity”? Instead of, say, “ensure access to decent/adequate housing”, you could say “ensure that they can live in dignity”.
https://www.nesri.org/programs/what-is-the-human-right-to-ho... Everyone has a fundamental human right to housing, which ensures access to a safe, secure, habitable, and affordable home with freedom from forced eviction. It is the government’s obligation to guarantee that everyone can exercise this right to live in security, peace, and dignity.
Gracias, Charles. A ver si consigo venderle el término "respectable" :-)
Real estate mobbing, also known as property mobbing, is the use of mobbing[1] techniques to constructively or forcibly evict a legal resident or owner from his or her dwelling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_mobbing)
I've never heard of "real estate mobbing", but I presume it means tenants being harrassed to try to get them to leave, so that the landlord can make more money, with fewer responsibilities, through short lets (AirBnB etc.).
Residential rented accommodation is becoming scarce and expensive in Valencia, where I live, and I believe the same is true in Barcelona. Vacation letting is definitely growing, and the two are generally thought to be connected. Tenants are facing exorbitant demands from letting agencies and often finding that faults are not repaired, and so on.
I expect he will love it, and it does get some authentic English Google hits (not very many, but some). To me personally it doesn't seem idiomatic, and indeed I don't think "digno" means dignified here. It can mean that ("Que tiene dignidad o se comporta con ella"), but in this context the meaning is surely "Que puede aceptarse o usarse sin desdoro. Salario digno. Vivienda digna" (DLE definitions 3 and 5: https://dle.rae.es/?id=DldD5zV ). So it really means "not demeaning". Compatible with human dignity, if you like, but not "dignified".
Any more opinions about "dignified housing"? I am sure my client will love that one, he wants everything as literal as possible. The term does have a lot of hits on Google, but I'd never heard it before, so I would like to make sure it's possible to use it, even though "decent" or "respectable" surely are more idiomatic... thank you!
Haha, well yes, clients who don't understand a single word of the target language are definitely the easier ones... on the other hand I am learning new terms here, so there's a positive side to it.