Voices en Español

I recently got the following letter from Caja Madrid, my bank in Spain. It’s a letter announcing [drumroll, please] that the bank now offers Internet banking services in English. Big deal. We’re like in what, the year 2008 and they’re just now getting around to this? What will they think of next? The ability to pay bills online?!

The very first sentence of the letter annoyed me. Here’s what it says:

En un país cuyo idioma aún no domina [In a country in which you still don’t speak the language]…. OK, stop right there. Huh? What an incredible assumption to make about a foreigner who has an account at your bank! I doubt you’d ever see such a letter from a Swiss bank to its international clientele… puede improvisar para pedir cualquier cosa –como un plato en un restaurante- porque sabe que una equivocación no resultará demasiado grave e incluso a veces divertido [you can improvise when asking for anything, like an entree in a restaurant, because you know that the mistake won’t be too serious and at times could be funny]… yeah, try telling that to the diner with an allergy to shellfish being served the paella with mussels.

To add insult to injury, on the front of the envelope are English translations for three conventional Spanish dishes. They just so happen to be dishes that the average tourist with a dog-eared copy of Lonely Planet already knows or, at the very least, can easily guess. For example, “calamari” is an extremely popular appetizer in the U.S. In some places, it’s virtually a fast food! Red Lobster, anyone? For someone who doesn’t speak the language, it’s not much of a stretch to figure out that “calamari is the same thing as “calamares.”

Anyway, the text on the front of the envelope, below my name and address, says:

Calamares a la romana are fried squid
Pescaito frito is marinated battered fried fish
Paella is saffron rice with vegetables and meat or seafood.

Inside the envelope, attached to the letter, is a pseudo menu with phonetic spellings for Spanish words. The whole thing is laughable. At the top of the menu it says “Practice your Spanish with the MENU not with your MONEY”.

It doesn’t know when to stop: “Sometimes deciding what to order in a Spanish restaurant requires a great deal of thought,” says the fake menu, before adding that English-speaking clients order food “without really thinking about what you’re ordering.”

Gee, thanks for the dime-store psychoanalysis. The whole thing is extremely condescending. I wish I had a scanner so I could post the letter and you could get the full (obnoxious) effect. The guy who signed his name to this missive, a José Andrés Fernández Marín, doesn’t have a clue. The sad part is that the marketing “genius” who put this little campaign together probably got plenty of kudos from his bosses for coming up with this very silly and clumsy letter. If I had a copy of Dale Carnegie’s classic self-help book in Spanish, I’d send it to them.