Cleaning Vocabulary

Question

Hello all!

I work for a company that provides janitorial services for companies (offices, churches, schools, etc). Many of our workers speak some English, but they are more comfortable with Spanish. We are having a training class soon, and I am stumped on how to translate part of the invitation.

Mostly, the problem comes from the habit in English of taking a noun and making it into a verb. Therefore, I have two questions: one general, and one specific.

First, specifically how would you translate:

"Dave will be supervising a strip and wax job this Saturday at 8AM."

(Strip in this case means removing the old wax that is already on the floor)

My best shot at it is:

"Dave va ser supervisar un trabajo quita y cera este sábado a las ocho de la mañana."

My second general question, is how do you "conjugate" a noun so that it is a verb? (for example, "wax" in the sentence above) I am not sure what this practice is called, so my Google search for help was a failure.

Thank you!

We have a conjugation tool under the "More" tab, which is at the top of your screen. - --Mariana--, Oct 28, 2011

Answer 1

Este sábado a las ocho de la mañana Dave va a demonstrar "como quita la cera y encerar los pisos"

Answer 2

According to this article the practice of forming verbs from nouns is called verbing.

I got "encerar" for the verb to wax and/or polish. - --Mariana--, Oct 28, 2011

Too bad that you found it. I wanted to use cera to demonstrate that it is a bad practice to assume that every noun has a verb form. - 0074b507, Oct 28, 2011