Holiday Season
In English we call the season from Halloween through New Years the "Holiday Season". Is there a way to express this time period in Spanish? I was thinking "Estación de Fiestas" or "Temporadas Festivas" but neither of those sound correct to me. Any suggestions?
3 Answers
What do you call the period between the 13 of March and the 8th of April? Imagine a foreigner whose country has a name for this period asking you this question. How do you translate that?
As far as I know, we don't have a name for "Holiday Season", and if you tried to call it "fiestas", people would wonder why holidays if they are not on holidays during that period.
Of course there are always many native Spanish speakers who -when confronted with the question "how to translate this?"- will resort to using a literal translation which is not used or understood by other natives. This attempts, however, sometimes become common use and some speakers adopt the foreign term, while the rest of the countries don't. It is no wonder each country calls things under different terms.
Where I come from the concept of this Holiday Season (with capital letters) does not exist. In these cases we'd say "estas fechas", which is more or less understood through context, but only during that period of the year. Otherwise I'd suggest that you don't translate it, and add an explanation of what it means, so people who are not familiar with your culture can understand what it means. Of course, don't be surprised if those who are very familiar with your culture said that "Estación de Fiestas" makes perfect sense in Spanish, but that's because they are so familiar with your culture that they don't realise that it is not part of our culture or tradition.
After having said that, I won't be surprised if people from other Spanish speaking countries tell me that it is a pretty common term where they live, so I'll just say that in Spain it wouldn't make sense. And notice that -and this is very interesting- in Wikipedia the only language that has an entry for it is English (French is the only language where people have tried to at least provide an explanation of what it is)
Thought provoking question!
And a reminder from Lazarus that most of the time I live in my own little world.
Just your question makes me realize that I have made assumptions... I always thought that it started with Thanksgiving (a very localized tradition when you realize it takes place primarily in only one of the countries sharing the North American continent), it never occurred to me anyone would think of it as starting with Halloween!
The computer doesn't care, so as Lazarus pointed out, an automatic translation might look like:
El tiempo de Navidad, [1] [2] la temporada navideña, [nota 1] o, simplemente, las vacaciones es un período anual festivo que rodea a la Navidad de vacaciones y otros días festivos. It is sometimes synonymous with the winter season in the Northern Hemisphere , and is usually said to occur between late November and early January . A veces es sinónimo de la temporada de invierno en el hemisferio norte , y generalmente se dice que se produce entre finales de noviembre y principios de enero .
That came by way of Google.es (instead of .com) and looking up Holiday Season and then clicking on traducir
Have to admit, though, I was happy to see a validation of my thinking it runs from late November rather than late October.
LOL - I should have explained the reason I was looking to translate it. I will be teaching a Spanish class to children this fall with the theme "The Holiday Season". As the class will run from mid-October through mid-December we will be covering holidays that happen during that time period (everything from "El Día de los Muertos" to "La Navidad"). I wanted the class title to be in Spanish, but then I realized that I had never heard the term for "Holiday Season" in Spanish, so I wanted to make sure I was translating it correctly. You both gave me fantastic insight as to why I would never have heard that term used before, and had I thought about it, your responses really make sense.
I think I will just go with the direct translation of the term so that I am able to put the title in Spanish, but I'll definitely include as part of my class that the term itself is American, and thus loosely translated.
Thanks for the input!!!
