Disclaimer on Spanish Language Usage in Travelogue Narratives

SAN GIL, Colombia- I travel the world and write narratives of my experience in travelogue fashion. Due to the nature of a blog, each article can be found and viewed separate from all others. This means that if an aspect of these entries runs though a succession of pages, I must assert it over and over again. This becomes arduous. Therefore I will make this announcement for regular readers:

[adsense]When I’m in a Spanish speaking country, take it for granted that the dialogue that I have with the local people happened in Spanish. It is rendered on this travelogue in English, as this is the prime language of this website. I do not want to write “I said in Spanish” or “she told me in Spanish” over and over again throughout these pages, as this would break up the flow of the narrative. Relatively very few people in Latin America speak English, so when I do have a conversation in English I will denote it specifically. For all other conversations, take it for granted that they occurred in Spanish.

I do not want to give the impression here that an English speaker can come to Latin America walking around communicating with everyone in their native tongue. They can’t, as very, very few people will be able to understand them. Many try travelers from Anglo speaking countries try though, and they struggle.

Without making this point of language usage known I feel as if these travelogue entries from Latin America are misleading.

Petra riding a llama and speaking Spanish

If I were writing a book about these travels — a contiguous work — I would only need to state this fact of language usage once. But in a blog, a chop shopped presentation of writing if there ever was one, I would need to mention this fact as a precursor to nearly every conversation — something I find me not doing actively. To these ends, I am publishing this page as a disclaimer that I can link to at the end of travelogue entries that contain translated dialogue.