By Liam Kinney, Alexika Translations Manager
“Wow, enjoy Rome! You’ve been before, haven’t you?” Correct! Just the four times now after my visit in mid-October, all coming in the last eight years. As unbelievably beautiful as it is, what is it that keeps luring me back to the Eternal City? Football is the simple answer. When I started watching Italian football over 20 years ago, Roma were the team that I fell for (for any calcio fans, Francesco Totti will always be il mio idolo).
Taking such a strong interest in Italian football, I naturally began to become interested in the country as a whole – its cities and geography, food and, as the years passed and my language studies became more serious, the Italian language. During my education, I unfortunately never had the chance to learn Italian. It was not taught at my secondary school, nor did I have the chance to learn it as a beginner in my first year of university when I had to pick up another language to accompany French, therefore opting for Spanish. I do, of course, love that I know French and Spanish, and I am especially proud of my journey with French which began at secondary school and took me all the way through college, university (including a year living in France) and concluded with a Master’s in Translation. However, given my love of Italian football and interest in the country, would I have learned Italian instead had the opportunity arose? The answer is a resounding sì.
Until recently, any Italian that I picked up over the years was primarily thanks to social media and the Internet – following footballers’ accounts, reading comments and Instagram replies from natives, watching match highlights with Italian commentary, etc. For a long time, I’ve been able to read Italian articles on football and understand pretty much everything – a very familiar subject matter, but still! Knowing French and Spanish has undoubtedly helped a lot and given me a bit of a head start. Before this trip though, I wanted to put more effort in so that I could speak more than just the odd word here and there when in Rome.
The first thing I did was to get on Duolingo. Of course, this can only take you so far, but it did equip me with some very useful phrases, e.g. the different ways of saying ‘I/we would like’ when ordering in a restaurant, bar, bakery etc, plus some other useful terminology. Other than that, and being the grammar nerd that I am, I took time to read up on certain grammar rules (pluralising nouns being one that I was previously unsure about) and made very frequent visits to WordReference – whether it was a word that I wanted to know the translation of or, as was more often the case, wondering how to conjugate a certain verb. I do love a verb table.
Arriving in Rome and hearing the Uber driver’s strong Roman accent (reminiscent of Totti’s) while talking on the phone did serve as a reminder, not that it was needed, that I wasn’t going to be coming here and engaging in any proper conversations. But I am happy with the bits that I was able to speak. Ordering food, asking for another drink etc all went smoothly, but it was the things I couldn’t prepare for – telling the Uber driver that we could get out here if it’s easier, asking a member of staff at Stadio Olimpico if we could enter in this gate or not, understanding and answering somebody asking if we were in a queue – that pleased me most. In a couple of cases, I did struggle with follow-up questions, but that didn’t dampen my spirits. After all, natives heard me speak Italian to them and decided that my Italian sounded good enough to speak it back to me – to say I’ve never actually properly learned or studied the language, I’ll settle for that!
At Alexika, we’ve been offering professional translation to and from Italian since 1998. To find out more, please contact us.