Lost in Translation in Galicia

The first time I truly got tangled in the linguistic web of Galicia, I was trying to meet a friend in Santiago de Compostela. Running a few minutes late, I sent a quick text: “Estou preto, chego en cinco minutos.” A simple message, or so I thought. In my mind, I had just written in Spanish, “I’m tight, I’ll be there in five minutes.” My friend, a native galego, immediately called me, laughing. “You’re tight? What do you mean?”

It turns out, I hadn’t written in Spanish at all. I had accidentally written in perfect Galician. In Galician, preto means “near” or “close.” In Spanish, the word for “near” is cerca, while prieto (what my phone likely autocorrected from my clumsy typing, or what a Spanish speaker might hear) means “tight,” “compact,” or can even be a descriptor for someone with a dark complexion. In that one word, I had stumbled headfirst into the beautiful, confusing, and utterly charming world of communication in Northwestern Spain.

So, What Exactly is Galician?

Before we dive into more linguistic mishaps, let’s clear something up. Galician (or galego) is not a dialect of Spanish. It’s a Romance language, just like Spanish, French, and Italian, but it shares a particularly intimate history with Portuguese. In the Middle Ages, Galician and Portuguese were one and the same, a language known as Galician-Portuguese, spoken across the western part of the Iberian Peninsula.

As Portugal established itself as a separate kingdom, its language evolved into modern Portuguese. Meanwhile, Galicia became more politically integrated with the Kingdom of Castile, and Spanish (Castilian) became the language of administration and high society. Galician, however, never disappeared. It remained the language of the home, the countryside, and the heart. Today, Galicia is a bilingual community where Spanish and Galician live side-by-side, often intertwining in a single conversation, or even a single sentence. This constant dance is what makes being “lost in translation” here such a common and insightful experience.

The Treacherous World of “False Friends”

My “preto/prieto” incident is a classic example of a “false friend”—words that look or sound similar in two languages but have drastically different meanings. Galicia is a minefield of them, waiting to trip up the unsuspecting Spanish speaker or learner.

Consider the humble scarecrow. On a walk through the Galician countryside, you’ll see plenty of these charming figures guarding the cornfields. In Galician, a scarecrow is an espantallo. A perfectly logical name—it “scares” (espanta) the birds. One day, admiring a particularly creative one made from old fishing nets, I remarked to a friend from Madrid, “¡Qué espantallo más original!”

He gave me a concerned look. “What fright? What happened?” In Spanish, espanto means “fright,” “terror,” or “a ghost.” He thought I’d seen an apparition in the fields, not a cleverly dressed bundle of straw. The Galician word for a fright is also espanto, but the scarecrow gets its own distinct, and much less terrifying, name.

Another wonderfully subtle trap is the verb pegar.

• In Spanish, pegar has two common meanings: “to hit” or “to stick/glue.”
• In Galician, pegar almost exclusively means “to stick/glue.” To hit someone is usually bater or golpear.

You can imagine the confusion when a Galician parent tells their child, who is covering a notebook in stickers, “Non pegues máis!” (Don’t stick any more!). A Spanish speaker from outside Galicia might interpret that as “Don’t hit anymore!”—a far more violent and contextually bizarre command.

The Portuguese Connection: A Bridge or a Maze?

Given that Galician is the mother tongue of Portuguese, you’d think knowing one would be a passport to understanding the other. And it is, to a large extent. Galicians can often understand spoken Portuguese with surprising ease, and vice versa. But this familiarity can breed a unique kind of confusion, creating a three-way linguistic puzzle with Spanish.

A famous example is the word for a young person.

• In Galician, a boy is a rapaz and a girl is a rapariga.
• In Portuguese, a boy is also a rapaz and a girl is a rapariga.
• In Spanish, a boy is a chico or muchacho. The word rapaz exists but is less common. However, the Spanish word rapariga is an archaic term that can carry pejorative connotations, similar to “wench” or “woman of loose morals.”

A Galician speaker referring to a young girl as a rapariga in a predominantly Spanish-speaking context could be met with shocked silence. It’s a completely innocent and standard term in Galicia, but a loaded one just a few hundred kilometers away. It perfectly illustrates how a word can be a bridge to Portugal and a barrier to Spain, all at the same time.

Food is another arena for delightful mix-ups. If you know some Portuguese, you might enter a Galician restaurant and ask for presunto, the Portuguese word for cured ham. They’ll likely understand you, but the word you’ll see on every menu and hear from every local is xamón—just like the Spanish jamón, but pronounced with the Galician “sh” sound. It’s a small difference, but a telling one.

More Than a Language: A Badge of Identity

After a while, you realize these linguistic quirks aren’t just hurdles; they are the very fabric of Galician identity. Choosing to say rúa instead of calle for “street”, or grazas instead of gracias for “thank you”, is more than a linguistic choice. It is a quiet declaration of a culture that has endured for centuries, nestled between the powerful influence of Castilian Spain and the fraternal pull of Portugal.

You’ll even hear it in the sounds. Many Galicians have distinct phonetic traits like the gheada, where a ‘g’ sound is aspirated, sounding like an English ‘h’ (so gato for “cat” sounds like “ghato”). Or the seseo, where the ‘c’/’z’ sounds of Spanish are pronounced as a simple ‘s’, a feature shared with Latin American and Andalusian Spanish. For decades, these features were stigmatized as “incorrect” Spanish. Today, they are increasingly embraced as authentic markers of Galician speech.

So, if you find yourself in this green corner of the world, listen closely. Listen for the soft ‘sh’ of an ‘x’, the musical cadence that feels gentler than Spanish, and the vocabulary that echoes across the border to Portugal. Don’t be afraid to get it wrong. In fact, lean into it. Ask why a scarecrow is an espantallo. Try to order your coffee in galego. When you get “lost in translation” in Galicia, you’re not really lost at all. You’re just taking the scenic route to the heart of its culture.