Here’s an easy one:
English: “I caught him red-handed”. Apparently the history of red-handed goes back to the 1400’s when it denoted blood on the hands.
Spanish: “Le he cogido con las manos en la masa” The literal translation would be, “I caught him with his hands in the dough”
I am American, but spent several years in Spain as a child and a teenager. For many years I have continued to study Spanish and to speak it whenever possible. It has struck me that the last frontier to true fluency in a foreign language is idiomatic and/or colloquial speech. For the last few years I have been assembling idioms, sayings and slang, both in English and Spanish. Sometimes the differences are quite interesting, and perhaps reveal some cultural differences (I think I have approximately 50 Spanish synonyms for prostitute). The other byproduct of my efforts is the realization that sometimes there’s just no way to translate a colloquialism into another language. My hope is to post a Spanish or English idiom several times a week.
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