memorial day

Question

How do you say " Have a happy Memorial Day"'? In spanish.
Gracias

Answer 1

Día de los caídos en la guerra

Answer 2

Thanks!! You guys!

Answer 3

Acabo de recibir un mail de mi amiga cubana que vive en Miami y me dice esto:

Answer 4

In Spain we also say: dia de acción de gracias

Answer 5

Man, you are always right! (wink)

Thanks for showing me this site. Google hits back it up. My textbook from years ago must have been wrong. As we say in Japanese: Hitotsu kashikoku natta! (I'm one (i.e., a little) smarter now!).

Answer 6

There are some cases where you can trasnlate it to spanish.
,Thanksgiving day, Dia de accion de gracias, navidad.

Good point. Although Navidad is, of course, a holiday in Spain and other countries, so it's not really applicable to this situation (translating the holidays of foreign cultures). And I think Thanksgiving is hard to pronounce for many Spanish speakers, which may be an incentive to translate it. BTW, I learned the translation as Día de acción de DAR gracias. Do you use the shorter form?

Another example of not translating a holiday is O-shogatsu in Japan. It means New Year's, but it is celebrated for almost a week, and is completely different from what is celebrated in the West (much less emphasis is placed on the stroke of midnight, for example), so it is often left in Japanese in English writing in order to convey this difference.

Holidays are sort of like food in this respect. They're culturally dependent, and hard to translate.

Answer 7

Thanks, Gustavo. Coming from you, that means a lot.

I just thought of a reverse example of why "Memorial Day" should not be translated (except for explanatory purposes): Cinco de Mayo. Nobody ever calls this holiday "The Fifth of May." It is just known by its Spanish name.

Answer 8

Charles,
You might want to post this in the Vocabulary section, rather than Proofreading.

On the radio here in California, the locutores always just say Memorial Day, since it is an American holiday and has no real equivalent in Spanish (or would be confused with similar holidays in other countries). If you are writing and need to explain it though, you might call it Día de Conmemoración de los Caídos. But remember that that is just a descriptive phrase.

Que tenga(s) un buen Memorial Day.