"Text/Chat Speak"

Question

I have seen countless posts in this forum asking for help translating text messages where the message was almost indecipherable due to extremely bad grammer, misspellings, or "text speak". Most of my spanish speaking friends do not text like this but there is at least one who does it all the time. It gets extremely frustrating trying to figure out what she is trying to say!!! My question is... How would you tell someone that you cannot understand what they are saying because it is written using "text speak" and ask them to write without abbreviations and text speak? The biggest problem is she did not understand what "chat speak" or "text speak" means and I have no clue how to translate that into something that someone who speaks only spanish could understand! Please Help!!!

Answer 1

Well, you can say something along these lines:

Desafortunadamente, no entiendo tus mensajes de texto abreviados. Para comunicarnos y entendernos mejor, te agradezco que me escribas palabras y frases completas. ¡Gracias!

Gracias Franco - harrahleah, Nov 28, 2012

Excelente. Lo mismo haría yo. :) - -cae-, Nov 29, 2012

Answer 2

I had the same problem with my girlfriend when we first got together. She and her friends and family use a lot of abbreviations some of which I did not understand. I did exactly what franco suggests and told her that I could barely understand complete Spanish sentences and could not at all understand her jibberish.

Now I am much better at the jibberish but still have trouble with the complete Spanish sentences. jajaja.

A few easy examples:

k = que pf = por favor pk = porqué kiero/es/e = quiero/es/e

The "e" is often dropped from estar and esto/a/e, etc.

Those are the one that come quickly to mind.

The ones you listed were easy enough to figure out but some of the things she wrote made no sense to me! For example I have seen K~ for que, but she was using k for quien. - harrahleah, Nov 29, 2012