May 17, 2013 08:50
11 yrs ago
Spanish term

me vi siendo profesora de mis padres,

Spanish to English Other Journalism Journalism
I would like to know the best translation of this phrase from Spanish into American English.

It's a translation of a document about journalism. Do you think is okay to translate as: I saw myself being my parent's teacher?

Here is the full paragraph:

Con los anos me vi siendo profesora de mis padres, cuando les corregía a la hora de hablar, luego de mis más cercanos amigos, luego al formar mi familia y tener hijos, ahí comencé el proceso de cómo hacer que unos pequeñitos nacidos en un país de habla no hispana aprendieran a amar....
Change log

May 17, 2013 08:50: changed "Kudoz queue" from "In queue" to "Public"

Proposed translations

+6
17 mins
Selected

I became/was my parents' teacher

or any other synonym

verse has several interpretations, including estar, encontrarse and imaginarse (Collins). In this case "saw myself" can safely be left out. In fact, "saw myself as" rather adds the negative connotation that this person saw/perceived herself/himself in the role of corrector of everybody's linguistic mistakes!
Peer comment(s):

agree franglish : "As time went on, I found myself correcting my parents' speech..." I'd rephrase the sentence. Previous querries tell us he's obsessed with grammar and spelling.
1 hr
thanks franglish! I have to say, s/he sounds a bit pompous to me ;)
agree Mariana Solanet : I became...
3 hrs
thanks Mariana!
agree philgoddard : Sounds like a translator :-)
5 hrs
thanks Phil ;))
agree Richard Hill
5 hrs
thanks Richard!
agree Zilin Cui
9 hrs
thanks Mafalda!
agree Emily Marcuccilli (X)
1 day 23 hrs
thanks Emily!
Something went wrong...
4 KudoZ points awarded for this answer. Comment: "Selected automatically based on peer agreement."
22 mins

The experience of having been my parents' teacher /of having taught my parents*

To make the sentence flow correctly, I suggest taking good care of the parallelisms: The experience of having been my parent's (Spanish) teacher, helping first them, and later close friends, to improve their conversational skills, and eventually forming a family and teaching my own children to speak the language...
Or: Over the years, I've taught my parents (to speak Spanish), correcting them as they learned to speak; later on I helped close friends as well, and with time, founded my own family and repeated the process with my children...
I'm assuming that this person is talking about the Spanish language.
Something went wrong...
7 hrs

I found myself teaching my parents.

The expression "me vi" followed by a gerund is quite common in Spanish, but not that much in English. I´d go for "found myself" because it sounds natural; it´s widely used and also because I believe it to be its semantic equivalent. It goes with the text flow and it conveys the original meaning, which is what you are looking for.
Example sentence:

I found my self teaching my parents, making corrections while they spoke, as I did with my closest friends shortly after.

Something went wrong...
Term search
  • All of ProZ.com
  • Term search
  • Jobs
  • Forums
  • Multiple search