PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATION IN THE SOCIAL AND NATURAL SCIENCES

Abstract: The nonfiction prose translator, particularly in the social and natural sciences, must address the problems of variable register, semi- and false cognates, the translation of quotations, and a wide range of terminology and nomenclature. At times, the non-translation of terms is preferable to obscuring their cultural specificity, and the translation of some  terms calls for cultural explication.  Care must be taken with the conversion of old and traditional units of measurement. Excerpts from two book translations illustrate some of these challenges and other problems that may interfere with the functionally equivalent transposition of a coherent but wide-ranging body of ideas into another language.
 

This article is based on the translation of two books in 2001: El collar del neandertal, or The Neanderthal’s Necklace, by Juan Luis Arsuaga, a Spanish paleoanthropologist writing for the general reading public, a bestseller in Spain (Ref. 1); and Entre el estado y la guerrilla: identidad y ciudadanía en el movimiento de los campesinos cocaleros del Putumayo (Ref. 6), a dissertation in cultural anthropology by María Clemencia Ramírez published as a book in Colombia. Its English title is Between the Guerrillas and the State: The Cocalero Movement, Citizenship, and Identity in the Colombian Amazon, published ten years later in the United States. Each book incorporates a wide range of lexical domains and a varied spectrum of registers.

The jacket of El collar tells us that besides the Neanderthals and the anatomically modern humans, “There is a third actor in the dramatic emergence of human consciousness. Without it this life and death story could not be told. It is the natural world, our common home that is so threatened today.” Arsuaga integrates ideas and terminology from a diverse set of natural sciences into his work. His position that Platonic-Cartesian dualities and shared symbolic behavior are defining human characteristics is a thread that runs throughout the book and his view of our evolution.

Arsuaga presents all these aspects of his argument without using any academic discourse whatsoever. The book is in the form of a narrative, evocative and even poetic at times: Donde los cursos de agua son irregulares, estos bosques de ribera de hoja caduca son sustituidos por sotos de adelfas y tarajes. “Where streams are intermittent, the deciduous trees on their banks give way to copses of oleander and tamarisk.” Arsuaga often quotes other authors, and since this book touches on so many currents of thought, the nature of the quotes varies widely. When translating a text that contains quotations, one must find, whenever possible, their published translations in the target language. Finding them may be very easy, if they are from widely-known sources such as Darwin, Shakespeare, the Bible, or Marx, for example. If the quote was originally written in the translator’s target language, he or she will of course use the original. Target language versions of some quotes may be difficult or impossible to find, however. In this book there were quotes from Spanish authors that had never, as far as I could determine, been translated into English. This was the case with the following quote from Spanish naturalist Eduardo Hernández-Pacheco:

Lo general y característico del relieve hispano es lo montañoso, lo escarpado, lo abrupto; el roquedo escabroso, lo montaraz, lo accidentado. De uno a otro confín peninsular: del Alto Pirineo a las Alpujarras meridionales; de la verde y lluviosa Galicia a las áridas y secas costas de Almería; de las montañas costeras catalanas a los acantilados atlánticos portugueses, las serranías y los macizos montañosos se enlazan unos con otros sin solución de continuidad.

I was called upon to evoke the author’s love for the land while presenting a concrete set of geographical data:

Rugged mountainous terrain is the norm in Hispania; it is emblematic of our land: its forbidding precipices; its boulder-strewn highlands; its bold and craggy landscapes. From one end of the peninsula to the other; from the high Pyrenees to the southern Alpujarra; from green and rainy Galicia to the arid coasts of Almería; from the mountainous Catalan shore to the cliffs of Portugal’s Atlantic coast, mountain chains and massifs intertwine without a breach.

In another case, there is a quote within a quote, neither available in English. Arsuaga quotes the Spanish geologist Eduardo Martínez de Pisón from his book La protección del paisaje: una reflexión. But within the citation, Martínez de Pisón quotes Mircea Eliade, the scholar of the history and philosophy of religion. I spent a good chunk of time in the library seeking the Eliade quote from his works in English, but I did not find it:

Si el mundo le habla a través de sus astros, sus plantas y sus animales, sus ríos y sus rocas, sus estaciones y sus noches, el hombre le responde mediante sus sueños y su vida imaginaria... Si el Mundo es transparente para el hombre arcaico, éste siente que él también es ‘mirado’ y comprendido por el Mundo. La caza le mira y le comprende (...), pero también la roca o el árbol o el río. Cada uno tiene su ‘historia’ que contar, un consejo que dar.

If the World spoke to him through its heavenly orbs, its plants and its animals, its rivers and its rocks, its seasons and its nights, man responded through his dreams and the power of his imagination... Since the World was transparent to ancient man, he felt that he too was ‘watched’ and understood by the World. Animals of prey saw and understood him..., but so did the rocks and trees and rivers. Each had its own stories to tell, its advice to share.

Throughout the book, Arsuaga uses the word hombre in its sense of “the human species.” The English translation may also be “humans,” “human beings,” or “humankind, and those are the words I used in the body of the text. But in the quotation above I chose to translate the generic hombre as “man” in keeping with Eliade’s somewhat old-world style. I did not want to impose an anachronic discourse upon the renowned professor of last century, and the use of generic “man” is in keeping with his other published works in English.

Arsuaga the scientist writes well for the public because he is able to express “big ideas” in a pleasing and understandable fashion, and because he uses his sense of humor to draw the reader near. Below is the second half of a paragraph in which he summarizes his view of cognitive science and social psychology as products of human evolution, and ends on a casual note with an unattributed near-quote from Bob Dylan. All cultural knowledge is important to the translator. That’s why it helps to have a few years under one’s belt.

... la identidad individual nos empuja al egoísmo y a la insolidaridad, la colectiva nos puede llevar al abismo, porque nos hace fácilmente manipulables. (...) han muerto decenas de millones de personas en conflictos entre grupos que se agrupan en torno de símbolos enfrentados, al mismo tiempo que toda desviación de la unanimidad del grupo, cualquier alejamiento de la necesaria homogeneidad social, ha sido sañudamente perseguido como una amenaza intolerable para la colectividad. ¿Será posible que algún día el ser humano pueda superar su permanente contradicción entre el individuo y el grupo? ¿Nos habrá conducido la evolución hacia un callejón sin salida? La respuesta, amigo lector, está en el viento. [Emphasis added]

While our individual identities promote egoism and neutralize the impulse to social solidarity, collective identity can lead to the abyss, because it makes us easily manipulable... tens of millions of people have died in confrontations between symbolically defined group identities. At the same time, any deviation from intragroup unanimity or resistance to necessary social homogeneity has been viciously persecuted as an intolerable threat to the collectivity. Is it possible that humans may someday overcome this abiding contradiction between the individual and the group, or has evolution led us into a blind alley? The answer, my dear reader, is blowin’ in the wind. [Emphasis added]

Be wary of the sometimes-false cognate permanente as employed above. In English, “permanent” means “eternal, lasting forever,” implicitly “irreparable” in “permanent damage,” and “lifelong” in “permanent job.” Spanish permanente shares this meaning of “everlasting”, but it can also be used to mean “incessant,” “continuous,” or even “recurrent.” Continuity, even if punctuated, is central to this sense of permanencia. Note the use of the noun and the adjective in these examples from other sources:

“La permanencia de nuestro país en la asociación...”
“Our country’s continued membership in the association...” (Ref. 3)

“servicio permanente => all-day service” (Ref. 2)

Thus su permanente contradicción becomes “this abiding contradiction.” In fact, Arsuaga specifically asks if this permanente contradicción may one day be overcome, logically ruling out the possibility of the cognate translation. English “permanent” is fundamentally monosemic.

False cognates are a major headache for the translator of related languages and languages in contact, since both the denotations and the connotations of words in one’s native language are so ingrained. A comment by John Lloyd Stephens, the 19th century writer on antiquities, illustrates this well. Stephens wrote two pioneering books on Mayan archeology. In Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, Stephens describes the sickness of a colleague, “the doctor”: “The third day the cura informed me that the expression of the doctor’s face was fatál [sic]. In Spanish this only means very bad, but it always had in my ears an uncomfortable sound.” (Ref. 9) Of course the Spanish word fatal also means “mortal,” the salient meaning of the English sometimes-cognate. But the most problematic cognates are precisely those that share some meaning, usually closer to the fundamental meaning of their common etymon, but where one or both of the modern derivatives has taken on one or more divergent meanings. Paradoxically, fatal is nearly monosemic in English, but not quite. An English to Spanish translator could logically err in the translation of expressions like fatal flaw or fatal error. The cognates of closely related languages or languages with a history of contact are like moving targets. Be very careful of questionable cognates among Romance languages or languages in contact with them. They have formed webs of meanings and implications in nearly one thousand years of semantic drift from their proto-Romance meanings, let alone from their Latin etymons. In addition, be aware that derived words tend to take on new and surprising meanings in other languages, and almost all modern languages are brimming with English-derived words.

Another excerpt fom El collar:
Hay dos especies de frondosas que reflejan a la perfección el carácter ecológicamente intermedio, casi indeciso, de algunos árboles ibéricos: se trata del roble melojo o rebollo, y del quejigo, más bien parecido a la encina. Ambas especies, que forman bosques tanto en la región eurosiberiana como en la mediterránea, son marcescentes, es decir, que las hojas se secan por completo en el otoño, como en las frondosas caducifolias, pero en muchos casos no llegan a caerse del árbol hasta la salida de las hojas nuevas en la primavera.

Two Iberian broadleaf species marvelously exemplify an intermediate, perhaps “indecisive” ecological adaptation. These are the Pyrenean oak and the Gall oak, the latter closely resembling the Holm oak. They can be found in both the Euro-Siberian and the Mediterranean region. They are marcescent, which means that like the leaves of deciduous species, their leaves completely dry up in the fall. Many of them, however, do not fall from the tree until new leaves grow in the spring.

For the non-expert, this presents some difficulties in the area of nomenclature. How can we go about translating the popular names of floral species, in this case trees? Animals also have popular names, but if we do not count insects, there are many more plant than animal species, and there are certainly more plant species with popular names. To complicate matters, these names vary from country to country and from region to region, and Spanish and English happen to be the most far-flung languages in the world. One can input the popular name of a species into a search engine, find its scientific name, and use that to find its popular names in a target language. For example, one can enter roble melojo, or better yet enter melojo and Quercus, since Quercus will be the first element in the scientific name of any oak. Having determined that the scientific name of roble melojo is Quercus pyrenaica, this is entered, along with the English word oak, to determine that the roble melojo is the Pyrenean oak. In a text of this nature, the process will be repeated many times (permanentemente but hopefully not permanently).

Sometimes more than one popular name will pop up for a given species in one or both languages. Then the translator must investigate the geographical extension of their respective uses. If no clear isoglosses can be determined, it may be useful to enter alternative popular names in a search engine to determine their relative frequency of use and sample the provenance of the web pages. A less common problem is the use of the same popular name to refer to more than one species. This often occurs when popular names were applied by exploring and conquering Europeans to species that resembled ones they were familiar with at home.

Over the past two centuries, terminology has been standardized in many different fields. Registers of nomenclature are published by such bodies as the General Conference of Weights and Measures, the Joint Commission on Biochemical Nomenclature, the International Astronomical Union Nomenclature Committee, and the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. They should be consulted where appropriate.

The sub-topical discussions in El collar del neandertal are extremely varied. Entre el estado y la guerrilla is topically, or horizontally, less varied, but it is by no means uniform. Its discourse varies on a vertical axis of registers between the two extremes of language primarily understood by intellectuals and a popular variety used by individuals with little or no formal education.

A dissertation in the Social Sciences requires the presentation of data on social phenomena to be analyzed within a defined methodological paradigm stated in formal terms. In cultural anthropology, the text will necessarily include extended quotations both from the study’s informants, often in “everyday” language, and from theorists and analysts writing in a sometimes abstruse style.

The letter below was written to a Colombian government agency by a group of campesino coca growers. It presents a special challenge to the translator because it employs an unusual hybrid register, being well conceptualized but expressed in nonstandard language. This is a problem more frequently confronted in the translation of vernacular fiction. The most obvious difficulty is to represent its poor Spanish spelling in English. Some authors may have corrected the spelling in the Spanish-language quote so as not to stigmatize its authors and not to distract attention from its content. But the translator must follow the lead of the author, who in this case had her own reasons to preserve the original orthography and style.

Señores de Corpoamazonia, defensoría del pueblo, agricultura, cómo vamos a sobrevivir los campesinos si el gobierno todo nos fumiga; con los cultivos ilicitos, tamvién nos fumiga los lícitos. Practicamente nos encontramos padeciendo de hambre. Nuestros pastos han sido fumigados junto con el platano, la yuca, el maiz, el arroz. Nosotros los campesinos lo que queremos es aserle entender al gobierno que como ustedes tamvien somos humanos que tamvien somos colombianos que como ustedes tamvien tenemos hijos. La pequeña diferencia que ay entre sus hijos y los nuestros es que de sus hijos nunca escucharán decir tengo hambre como nosotros escuchamos a menudo de los nuestros despues de la fumigación y lo único que podemos responder la cruda verdad que el Gobierno con todo acabó. (Transcripción ortográfica original y énfasis mío).

The simulated errors in English had to be like those that either natives of English or Spanish-speaking immigrants could logically make. They needed to be consistent and apparently motivated by the poor phoneme-grapheme correspondence of English. The definite article was inserted in “the yuca, the corn, the rice,” in order to maintain some of the Spanish flavor, almost as though immigrant workers in the United States had written the letter with interference from their native Spanish. In the end, the publisher’s proofreader left fewer and perhaps less glaring errors than I put into the original translation and I accepted the changes.

Gentlemen of Corpoamazonia, of the Ombudsman, agriculture, how are we campesinos going to survive if the goverment fumigates evrything we have? Along with the ilegal crops, they also fumigate the legal ones. We’re suffering from hunger. Our pasturs have been fumigated along with the plantain, the yuca, the corn, the rice. We campesinos what we want to do is make the goverment understand that like you we to are humans, that we are also Colombians that like you we have childrin to. The only diference between your childrin and ours is that your children will never be herd to say I’m hungry like we hear alot from are children after the fumigation and the only thing we can say is the plane truth that the government did away with evrything (Letter to Ombudsman’s Office, July 26, 1998. Emphasis added; spelling and grammar intended to reflect those of the original Spanish-language letter).

The words “campesino” and cocalero are not translated. “Campesino” is a loan word in English that now appears in both British and American monolingual dictionaries and better evokes the North American image of the Latin American peasant than does the word “peasant” itself. In fact, to many English speakers, “campesino” specifically means campesino latinoamericano, so the non-translation is strategic. Cocalero is a relative neologism sometimes written with italics even in Spanish, although less so today than when the book was written almost ten years ago because it is less “neo” than it was then. Its translation would be cumbersome, as in the context of the peasant movement it includes not only small coca growers but also those who work for wages in the coca harvest or in coca processing.

Other quotations illustrate the difficult situation that some cocaleros found themselves in. They present another register, that of oral campesino discourse. The Spanish transcription employs orthographic forms commonly used to represent popular pronunciation and grammar:

Verá, yo trabajé en dos fincas en la época de la coca, en una nos pagaban con plomo y en la otra con bazuco. El que llegaba, era de esclavo (…) Cuando eso a San Miguel llegaban diario como veinte o treinta hombres y mujeres. Venían de todas partes; paisas, negros, indígenas, pero más que todo eran de Nariño. Allí siempre había tipos desconocidos ofreciendo trabajo y llegaba vusté y les preguntaba “tiene trabajo”?, sí pa ochenta trabajadores” listo vamos y los montaban en diez quince o veinte canoas y de ahí ya nadie se podía bajar, se tenía que ir...

Yes, I worked on two farms during the coca boom. On one they paid us with threats and on the other with bazuco [cocaine byproduct similar to crack]. It was slavery… When this was going on about twenty or thirty men and women were arriving in San Miguel every day. They came from all over, Paisas [from Antioquia and northern Caldas], Blacks, Indians, but mostly they were from Nariño. There were always some strangers there offering work, so you got there and asked them, “Do you have work?” “Yeah, we need eighty workers.” “OK, so let’s go.” And they loaded them into ten, fifteen, or twenty canoes. From that moment on nobody could back out. You had to go...

Allá nunca recibimos un peso, la paga era en vicio y si alguno cobraba lo mataba y si se volaba le mandaba tres pistoleros pa’ rematarlo. El tipo tenía doce hectáreas nos mantenía de esclavos, nos enviciaba pa que le siguiéramos pidiendo.

We never got a peso there; we were paid in drugs. If anyone asked for money they killed them right there and if anyone ran away they sent three gunmen to hunt them down and kill them good. The guy had twelve hectares and we were his slaves. He got us addicted so we would keep asking for more.

Note that the first translation has a two braceted notes that do not appear in the Spanish since the Colombian reader, but not necessarily the English-speaking academic, knows that bazuco (or basuco) is a byproduct of cocaine production, similar in form, use, and effect to crack cocaine. It is not easy to find the word in a glossary and the spelling is not regularized, but the letter 'z' in the Spanish is sometimes replaced with an 's' in English. The second note is required to explain to the international reader what every Colombian knows, that the word paisa refers to a particular regional origin. The translation must take into account the background knowledge, or lack thereof, of the intended audience. The translation of popular registers requires greater familiarity with equivalently colloquial expression in the target language and culture. In such registers, there is no neutral variety; it is important that the translator belong to the same language community as the audience, or be very good at faking it. After all, an Australian translator would produce a very different version of informal English than a Texan, a Liverpudlian, etc.

One side note on editing: My original translation of en una nos pagaban con plomo in the first paragraph above was more literal: “on one they paid us in lead.” It was the copyeditor who suggested a change to “they paid us with threats.” I prefer my own translation because it indicates real reprisals as opposed to just threatened ones, and I don’t know why the change was suggested, but it was acceptable to me in the context of reviewing an entire book manuscript and deciding whether or not any particular change produced an egregious result. While I accepted the change, I believe that the phrase “lo mataba” in the second excerpt supports my original version as opposed to the copyeditor’s.

Another discourse style in this book is used to impart semi-technical information in popular terms, a variety of language used by campesinos working in the processing of coca leaf. In the following quotation a woman explains the process and employs the image of an analogous stage in cheesemaking. This metaphor is meaningful to the author in that it illustrates the routine nature of the work for those who find themselves involved in it, despite the fact that it illegal and highly stigmatized by mainstream society.

Primero se revuelve la hoja picada con guadaña y se la revuelve con cemento y agua hasta que alcance a humedecer. Por una arroba de coca, un kilo y medio de cemento (...) se le echa un litro de agua con dos cucharadas de ácido sulfúrico (...) Luego se bate por unos minutos (...) y se sigue trabajando con el agua. Se corta con soda o amoníaco, luego se la pone a fritar. Eso es como sacar queso: si sale con mucha agua eso hay que fritarla, hay que sacarle la mugre y el agua y ya se pone a escurrir en un platón y ya se la saca.

First you chop up the leaves with a scythe and then stir them with cement and water until it’s all wet. For one arroba of coca, a kilo and a half of cement… You throw in a liter of water and two spoonfuls of sulphuric acid. You want to beat it together for a few minutes and then continue with the water. You cut it with soda or ammonia and start cooking it. It’s like making cheese: If it’s too watery you have to cook it more; you have to remove any pieces of grunge or too much water, strain it in a bowl and there it is.

The word arroba is italicized although it appears in some English dictionaries, because not many readers will recognize it as an English word, much less know what quantity it represents. It could have been converted to English or metric units, but the quote would then have lost its cultural specificity. The word is used a number of times in the book, and is defined in terms of kilograms upon its first appearance. The conversion of measurements can be tricky, particularly in the case of old or traditional units like the arroba. As a matter of fact, the arroba represents different quantities in Spain, Portugal, and their numerous former colonies. (Ref. 8) According to the Oxford Spanish-English dictionary, it is not only a unit of weight that varies regionally from 11 to 16 kilos, but can also refer to two different units of liquid volume, one relevant to wine and the other to olive oil. (Ref. 5) Such units must be translated or converted in terms of local usage. In the Spanish speaking world this problem arises with several terms, such as vara, cuerda, and quintal, and in phrases such as una carga de mula. In a section of El collar del neandertal an old Russian unit of distance called the verst is discussed in the context of a historic expedition to Siberia in search of frozen mammoths. Tools for converting these and many other units are available on the web at sites such as Medidas Antiguas y Modernas and Convert-me.com. Like arrobas, toneladas can be misleading. Take care to ascertain whether the word refers to metric tons, British tons, or American tons.

Another note on conversions: In many cases an author will have rounded off his or her measurements. Why should the translator provide an exact conversion of this inexact figure? Instead, provide an equally plausible round number in the target culture’s measurement system. For example, the following quote appeared in the New York Times on March 21, 2002: ``It looks like there were around 66 pounds of explosives,'' Juan Piperis, deputy commander of Lima's firefighters, told reporters.” (Ref. 7) Señor Piperis presumably said in Spanish that there were about thirty kilos of explosives, an estimate that can comfortably be translated into pounds as “around 65,” not “around 66.”

The primary protagonists of Entre el estado y la guerrilla are those people described by social scientists as “organic leaders,” “natural leaders,” or “peasant intellectuals,” the central actors in peasant movements around the globe. Originating within peasant society, they are grassroots social analysts and political actors. A campesino union leader describes the phenomenon:

...sólo que cuando entendemos que organización hay que cualificarla y que hay que ligarla a otro tipo de objetivos como son los objetivos políticos y económicos de carácter nacional, entonces ya dicen que no somos tan naturales, pero a mí me parece que uno sigue siendo líder natural porque es un campesino. No se hizo líder en la academia, por decir algo, aunque algunos logran, cuando tienen la posibilidad de mejorar sus niveles académicos pero uno sigue siendo un líder natural, de todos modos no se hizo líder en las aulas, uno se hace líder, va escalando peldaños...

…when we understand what kind of organization we need, and that we need to make connections with other goals, political and economic goals that may be national in scope, then they say that that we’re not so natural any more. But it seems to me that because you’re a campesino, you continue to be a natural leader. You don’t become a leader through your academic studies let’s say, although some do study when they have the opportunity to improve their education. But you continue to be a natural leader not from what you learn in classes but from a step by step process of improving yourself…

This recorded and transcribed statement is expressed in structures typical of the Colombian ernacular. It is difficult to discern to what extent the speaker indicated the junctures of his clauses with intonational contours or syntactic pauses, but we can see that the English uses more periods. This discrepancy also shows up in written texts as opposed to transcriptions like this one. As Juan Gabriel López Guix and Jaqueline Minett Wilkinson comment, “English often uses a period before conjunctions, adverbs, or phrases where more subtly indicated pauses are likely in Spanish.” (Ref. 4)

Finally, the author herself writes with the complexity necessary to reference theoreticians, establish relationships between their ideas, and relate that synthesis to her case study. The translator’s challenge is to follow her thinking step by step:

A partir de las reflexiones anteriores, se está haciendo implícitamente un llamado a enfocar el análisis en el surgimiento de nuevas formas de acción colectiva que ponen en evidencia nuevos procesos de significación, que aunque moldeados por discursos hegemónicos, buscan contestarlos, redefinirlos, articularse a ellos o abandonarlos. (...) Dagnino (1998) busca entender la resignificación de las relaciones entre cultura y política en las luchas democratizadoras y arguye que la operacionalización de esta concepción alterna de democracia, se lleva a cabo a través de la redefinición de la noción de ciudadanía y de su referente central, la noción de derechos ciudadanos. (...) Para la definición de esta nueva ciudadanía, Dagnino parte del replanteamiento de la noción de derechos a partir de la concepción del derecho a tener derechos. Para el caso del Putumayo, el sentimiento de exclusión es definitorio de esta región y es en este contexto que se lucha también por el “derecho a tener derechos”.

The ideas expressed above implicitly suggest a focus on the emergence of new forms of collective action that illustrate new understandings, that although brought into being in the context of hegemonic discourses, seek to answer them, redefine them, link up with them, or abandon them… Dagnino (1998) examines the redefinition of the political and cultural dimensions in the struggle for democracy and argues that an alternative conception of democracy is effectuated through a redefinition of the notion of citizenship and of its central referent, the notion of citizenship rights… In defining this new citizenship, Dagnino understands the notion of rights as presented in the conception of the right to have rights. The perception of exclusion is a defining characteristic of Putumayo, providing the context for a struggle for the “right to have rights.”

In this paper I have described and exemplified some of the difficulties that the non-fiction translator confronts in a heterogeneous text containing a wide variety of quotations and terminology, and written in multiple registers and discourse styles. I have also discussed some other problems that may challenge the translator, and tried to illustrate the level of care that such texts demand.

REFERENCES

1. Arsuaga, Juan Luis. El collar del neandertal. Madrid: Ediciones Temas de Hoy, 1999. Translation by Andy Klatt published as The Neanderthal’s Necklace. New York, Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002.

2. Gran Diccionario Moderno Español- Inglés / Spanish –English. Paris: Larousse, 1983, p. 530.

3. Hamel, Bernard H. Hamel’s Comprehensive Bilingual Dictionary of Spanish False Cognates. Los Angeles: Bilingual Book Press. 1998.

4. López Guix , Juan Gabriel and Jacqueline Minett Wilkinson, Manual de traducción, Inglés / Castellano. Barcelona: Editorial Gedisa, 1999, p. 146.

5. Oxford Spanish Dictionary. Oxford, New York, Madrid: Oxford University Press, 1998

6. Ramírez, María Clemencia. Between the Guerrillas and the State: The Cocalero Movement, Citizenship, and Identity in the Colombian Amazon. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 2011.

7. Ramírez, María Clemencia. Entre el estado y la guerrilla: identidad y ciudadanía en el movimiento de los campesinos cocaleros del Putumayo. Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Colciencias. 2001.

8. Reuters: Car Bomb Kills 9 near US Embassy in Lima, in the New York Times on the Web, March 21, 2002.

9. Rowlett, Russ. How Many? A Dictionary of Units of Measurement. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, on the World Wide Web, 2001.

10. Stephens, John Lloyd. Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, Edited by Karl Ackerman. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1996, p. 67.