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- "La carne fue hecha hoy."
186 Comments
I disagree with this translatoin. Even though in spanish you do say meat is "hecha", it means it's cooked or prepared. You do not make meat. The proper english translation would be "The meat was done today". That way it also refers to preparing or doneness, which is the intent of the spanish sentence.
prepared - preparada
made - hecha
Duo usually doesn't want you to swap words. It doesn't matter what makes more sense, they give you what they give you.
Actually, that is not true in every case. Duolingo often views it as acceptable when I translate a Spanish sentence by adapting it to fit the way it would make sense in English, even when a Spanish word is not directly/literally translated. The intent of the speaker or statement must be taken into consideration when translating.
Be aware that, when enough people do not upvote a correct interpretation, said interpretation sometimes reverts to not being accepted. This is not to say that it shouldn't be. Rather, we users need to embrace the colloquialisms that each language has.
Right.
We are supposed to be learning what is being presented and since we are but studernts taking a course in Spanish we need to shut the hell up and pay attention to what is being taught, and at least up to the point we can become fluent. Then maybe our opinions might amount to something higher than a hill of beans, a quality and knowledge level we don't presently have except for the self deluded. Their personally assessed rank naturally reaches to infinity.
This app works because we crowdsource help and product refinement. "Shutting the hell up" would ruun duo. Go play with rosetta stone.
Eugene Tiffany- Don't let me catch you in these comments telling folks to shut the hell up, when learning is inquiring information, and if you don't ask you won't know... So please be kind to your fellow student.
This comment from crowflys pertains to Eugene Tiffany's misspelling of "student" as "student." Thus, this comment shouldn't be downvoted.
That's what I like about you—your modesty. It brings out the best in people.
DL does respond but it takes a very long time, and in my case it only let me know that my suggested answer had been added to the "accepted" list. I just received such a note this week. And I did a happy dance.
I agree that the English translation is wrong but you also don't "do" meat. I wouldn't say "The meat was done today" unless I was muttering to myself; "Right, I've done the veg, I've done the meat, I've done the pudding/dessert..." i.e. 'I've finished that part of the preparation" but in reality, as you said, it appears that the intent is to discuss 'preparation' so I think they should change this to 'The meat was prepared today'.
Actually this is the formal usage of done. Saying i am done instead of i am finished can sound informal. However meat is cooked until it is done.
There's no difference in formality between saying 'done' and 'finished' when talking about something being 'ready' - unless you're a prescriptivist and this is really important to you (no one else cares).
https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/done-and-finished/
I am sensing a bit of hostility here. I never said it was incorrect. If you want to go around spreading an elementary vocabulary, then go for it. Who am I to try to make you sound sophisticated? However for someone learning English, it might be in their interest to sound more impressive to a native speaking employer or group of peers.
"The meat is done" means more like "finished", "prepared", than "cooked". The phrase is not particularly colloquial.
I Agree saying done instead of finished is like saying fixin to instead of saying i am about to or i am preparing to
"Fixin to" is very different from "I am about to" and "I am preparing to." One reason is because "fixin" is a misspelling. Another reason is because "fixing to" is a regional expression, whereas "I am about to" and "I am preparing to" are heard everywhere in the English-speaking world.
Nope, no hostility. Or at least, no more or less than your original comment.
Trust me learners: you can safely ignore this ridiculous comment! Absolutely no one cares if you say "I'm done" / "I've done" / "I'm finished" / "I've finished".
Thank you for this link about prescriptivism. Reading it, I was struck by how strongly Eugene Tiffany is ruled by it. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
That being said, I defend E.T. to the extent that there should be some prescriptive consistency, at least when it comes to spelling and punctuation. However, the inclusion of acceptable alternative translations is the holy grail of true bilingualism.
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I agree and well written explanation that is easy to follow. This should one that does get changed.
I have received letters thanking me for my suggestions. And they were used. I can only recall my first, however. That was way way back when we learned what "casa" meant. I suggested that "place" be added. And it was. So I know the Report system does have a real person behind the curtain.
Do recommended changes ever get changed? Has anyone received personal acknowledgement of a recommended change? How often (if ever) are recommendations reviewed by DuoLingo?
I have received a few emails when I suggest translations or alternatives that sound better with an acknowledgement saying that phrase is now accepted and encouragement to keep it up and to continue providing valuable feedback. Duo is a community driven language tool so don't hesitate to try and contribute.
Yes, I have received emails thanking me and letting me know the change will take place. When they don't agree to change it though, they don't send an email to explain why not and I think that has to do with sheer quantity of feedback, so we are left to figure that out with dictionaries and grammar sites. This particular sentence did leave me wondering if they meant that the meat was butchered and packaged ready to sell or whether they meant that it was cooked.
Yes I made a suggestion once and they changed it. They also wrote back to let me know:). So it is worth flagging things up if you aren't sure.
Yes, I have received notification that my suggestion resulted in them accepting something - more than once. Pero depues un tiempo largo.
I have received one email from DL saying that they implemented the change that I had recommended. I'm still waiting on all the others.
Yes, all the time. I've read comments stating that only the first person to report a change gets the notification so it's worth going back after a while and checking the lesson.
- 1062
Yes, I have gotten notifications that they now accept my translations on several occasions..
The first time I had this exercise, I reported this and they now translate it as "prepared."
The butcher makes ground beef, and it's always better when it was made today. Who wants some made last week?
"The meat was done" usually means that is was cooked.
"Is the meat done?""Yes, it's done"= Yes. it's cooked/ready to eat.
"The meat was prepared today" is probably better.
This may be regional but in my part of the world we do use "made" to mean cooked or prepared. I made lasagna. I made chicken enchiladas. I made steak for dinner. It's very common.
- 694
Your examples are all in active voice, and they all contain a dish rather than an ingredient. "The milk was made"? "The water was made"? The lasagna and the chicken enchiladas probably were - they don't seem to grow on trees. "I made us some potatoes" sounds fine to me - I prepared them for eating, because we probably weren't going to bite into them raw and unpeeled. But "the potatoes were made"? Sounds odd to me.
"The meat was prepared today" would be ideal. "La carne fue preperado hoy".
I agree and i left out was because I did not see it in the sentence so i got it rong. :C
If i ask when was this turkey made the answer would be it was made today. We do not Always say done or ready
- 581
Why would you ask that.? When was this turkey cooked or when was this turkey packaged would be more normal
I am spanish and I would never say "la carne fue hecha hoy", as "fue hecha refers to the past". I would say "la carne se ha hecho hoy"
I doesn't matter, when you say today you refer to the present. If you wanted to refer to the past but within the day of today you'd say "la carne fue hecha antes", or, "la carne fue hecha esta mañana" (even that sounds wrong to me, but some people use it).
What has already happened today is not the present, it is the past.
"There was an accident on 5th Street today" (but it has already been cleared away).
"There was a big sale at Target today" (but now it's over).
"He was absent from school today" (school has already finished for the day).
Yes, you are completely right in terms of English but the Spanish don't agree - and we are supposed to be learning Spanish and should accept their greater knowledge on the subject.
Yep, El tipo esta equivocado. También soy nativo; pero luego de 3 años, supongo que ya todos resolvieron sus dudas...
Translating literally it would be "Fue hecha antes" or "Se hizo antes", although in Spanish actually we don't use the passive form so much. I personally would say "He hecho la carne hoy" or "La he hecho hoy".
- 173
It's intersting...in Spain whenever you do something on this same day, during this week, this same month, this year...even during this life...they use the present form of haber + past participle. Hoy he comido el desayundo, esta semana hemos hablado mucho con nuestros amigos, este año ellos han viajado mucho. I think in Latin America the simple past (Preterite) is used instead
That's a Spanish-specific thing, though. Other parts of the Spanish-speaking world use the "other" past much more liberally. The use of haber is much less common outside of Spain.
Ha hecho is past tense according to my Spanish verb book. Does the "se" change that somehow? Regarding something you said it a post down page... are you saying that in Spanish you never use past tense if something happened today? That is very confusing to me since in English we use past tense as soon as the action is completed.
"ha hecho" is the present perfect tense. I have heard that it is widely used in place of the past tense if it's referring to the very recent past (i.e. earlier today)
"Ha hecho" is the third person for the present perfect tense and "hecha" is the past participle (feminine) which is used in the passive.
- 2359
I see and hear "hecho hoy," "hecho reciente," and "hecho por mano" all the time when referring to food, especially when trying to emphasize that the ingredients are fresh, particularly in advertisements and commercials.
My teacher says to the kids in our spanish class "bien hecho" as in well done. If i were to order a steak at a restaurant and they asked my how I like it made would "bien hecho" work in the same way?
No. You would just be saying " Well made." Which might be offensive. "Bien cocinada" might work.
You might have el churrasco jugoso (so bring a jug for the blood,) a punto, or bien cocido. If you want it mucho bien cocido, your churrasco will arrive charred.
Hope someone answers your question as I'm really interested to know that, too :).
I'll go with the native speakers here and accept 'done' isn't said like I thought.
Prepared is: preparado. So you are talking about a different sentence.
This is nitpicking, E. T. I suspect that everyone at this level knows that "preparado" means "prepared." I'm just adding this comment to let others know, despite the downvotes, that you're correct when you post that "prepared" = "preparado." The gist of our disagreement is how far an interpretation can go before it becomes inaccurate, and your comment is a good example of when more flexibility is necessary.
I agree with the host of people who find this sentence unnatural in English. We would say 'fresh' or 'prepared' or 'done' but never made. I do not know how to report this to DuoL as the only option available in this instance is to report that the Spanish is wrong not the English.
Similarly I agree meat cannot be made. It can be done, prepared, cooked, etc. The translation is plain wrong!
I think that hecha can mean done, prepared, etc depending on the context. Translation is not a one to one thing. Many words (in most languages, not only Spanish) have multiple meanings.
I agree, I am English and in English we do not 'make' meat, you can cook, prepare, buy, butcher, tenderise, sell, kiss, bury, kick, stroke, rub, season.... So many things you can do with it, but one thing you can't do is make it!
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You can make steak for tea, you can make pork chops to sell you can make anything for eating, selling. giving etc, etc. It's all in the preparation ;-)
I was as indignant as all the others who have complained - until I remembered hearing, on an American cookery programme "We're making chicken today". I watched, agog, to see how --- but the presenter just COOKED dead beasties, as proper English-speaking housewives do !...
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As a native speaker I would use the reflective "la carne se ha hecho hoy" rather than the passive "la carne fue hecha hoy"
- 1531
Un filete muy/ poco hecho = a well done/ rare steak
At the kitchen:
"La carne se está haciendo" = the meat is being cooked.
At a restaurant:
-¿Cómo quiere el filete /la carne? = How do you want the steak / meat?
- Al punto, poco hecho / -a. = Rare.
Yes I agree. Meat is not made. 'The meat dish was prepared today' would be more normal.
Meat was MADE? Doesnt it sound a bit strange? Meat can be cooked, rosted, but made?
the translation given for "hecha" is "off the peg" which makes a lot more sense than "the meat was made today". How in the world can you "make" meat?
As a native speaker I can assure you that we use this sentence but it refers to cooking meat or making a meat dish not "making" meat per se.
What does 'off the peg' mean? I have never heard this phrase before and I have lived in many parts of the USA as well as several Pacific islands.
Bacon is a derivative meat product prepared by curing pork. It makes more sense to say making bacon than it does to say making pork, linguistic peculiarities notwithstanding.
That reminds me of going to school at the University of Arkansas back in the '70s. The school's mascot is a razorback pig, and someone got the bright idea to make a sweat shirt with two razorbacks in a rather compromised position with the title "Makin' Bacon". It was hilarious. Unfortunately the admins did not think so and they cracked down on that. Ah, the '70s...
It is an idiom in the US anyway for having sex. Especially in the Southern states. It may have come from two pigs, having sex=making a piglet=making bacon. Idioms are strange, but interesting in any language.
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I make corned beef. One can make sausage or smoked meat. And it could have been made today.
To make all those items you mention, you have to start with meat which already exists. You then turn it into a different form of meat but you do not make MEAT.
In American English, it is an idiom: "I am making you a hamburger." "I am making chicken for dinner tonight."
In American English, we don't say we make meat-- we make something out of or with meat.
When the English translation is absurd, or at least, seemingly absurd, as with "The meat was made today." then we have to wonder exactly what are the Spanish words saying. I ask myself am I missing something, is there a reasonable occasion to say " The meat was made today." or is it just silly?
Have you considered what the words of the Spanish sentence is saying and how that should be our number one focus of attention?
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I agree. It is my common to be specific and say "I am making chicken tonight or I am making beef tonight, rather than I am making meat, but I would still accept I am making meat today.
I don't understand why we are using "hecha" with an "a" as the last letter. I see the comment below that this is the past feminine passive, but i don't see it in the 2 conjugators on line- all use hecho only. Digame, por favor
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Hecha... first time I am hearing of this in spanish. Hecho I have heard and am familiar with. but not hecha. what expression is this
Past participles (like "hecho" for the verb "hacer") can sometimes act like adjectives - when they do, they take on the gender of the thing they are describing.
The closed book - El libro cerrado
The closed door - La puerta cerrada
What JuevesHuevos says about participles acting as adjectives should make sense to us naturally; English participles act as adjectives all the time, too. From the verbs: "run" (the running man), "talk" (the talking parrot), "scare" (the scared child), etc.
If meat was freshly butchered today, would this sentence be appropriate to that circumstance? Or is there a more common way to express that? I've heard "The meat is done." to mean it is completely cooked, but "made" doesn't really seem to fit that situation?
If it's an idiom in Spanish, they should not have translated it directly into English.. they should translate the meaning. You can tell by all the comments that people were confused by this.
For anyone wondering why it isn't "hechada"
Sometimes we do use the term made with meat but usually it is when referring to the meat in the cooked state. I made roast turkey. I made roast beef. I made meatloaf. I made Fried Chicken.
It could also refer to meat that you have processed to a point. I made stew meat.
I can't think of a single instance when you would otherwise say I made meat in normal conversation.
All this said, it is good for Duolingo to give more direct translations because we are not translating to help someone else understand what a foreign language speaker is saying. We are translating so that we can understand the words that are being said. It is helpful to know that the phrase I made meat in Spanish means I prepared to me in English and the only way to do that is for the translation to be direct
English is an annoying language, it is a total confusion of words in many ways, I say that as an English person. So I am not going to explain it, I wrote a long detailed analysis of why its wrong.. but it made me look like a madwoman..so I am just echoing what people have said previously - the meat could be prepared, cooked, butchered, chopped, done (within the kitchen before serving) even but it can not be made today.
I am english and we would probably say "the meat dish was made today". Or as k701 says "the meat was prepared today"
- 1476
Maybe my recollection is off, but wasn't it Como solo carne cocinado. Is carne masc. or fem.?
They marked me wrong for saying " The meat was done today " This is a perfectly correct translation but you will lose a heart if you type it in. Buena suerte
I took it to mean freshly butchered; dumbed it down to done rather than made; and promptly tore up a heart. I do like crrrivers explanation of made being acceptable though. It's off to the report button for me!
I agree that in English you cannot make meat. You cook the meat (that is already made)
I'd be grateful if someone could explain to me what verb form "hecha" is in this sentence, and why it's being used.
Hecha means: made
Adjective: complete , taken , mature , ready-made , ready-to-wear , made-up , tied , looped
- 1205
is there a native Spanish speaker who could explain when 'hecha' would be used as 'off-the-peg'?
How do u make meat? U literally tear off the flesh of an animal (hopefully ;)) unless you're a cannibal, and prep it- uless you're 1 of thise freaks thatveats it raw ;p. Oh Duo, The Lil' Owl, u, u can be so freaking nasty at times. :) But, I guess, u truly are a cannibal, since u eat ur other animal species- LIIIIVVVVE! :D
I tried 'the meat was fresh today' having previously tried 'prepared' - marked as incorrect. Jan 2018
Shouldn't that be "The meat is fresh today."? Anyway, duoLingo isn't very good at changing perspective. You can change the perspective of the sentence and still maintain the mean. "He kicked me." meaning the same thing as "I was kicked by him." duoLingo doesn't seem to like that.
Hizo and hecho both mean "made" right? So could i say "Èl hecho esta comida" ?
They're of different tenses, "hizo" and "hecho". You still need "hizo" for that because that's a simple past (preterite) construction (if indeed that was what you intended to express). "Hecho", as a verb, is a participle (past), so you need another verb to go with it. Just like in English construction, we say "have/has made" (he/has/ha/hemos/han hecho). Of course, the tense would have then changed from simple past to present perfect.
In this case, "hecha" is used as an adjective with the "be" verb "fue".
Yo he hecho la carne.
La carne fue hecha.
In other words, past participles can act as adjectives when used with "be" verbs in Spanish (ser, estar).
Él está sentado, ella está sentada. Él está cansado, ella está cansada.
Tried the meat dish was made today-no luck. But if we are learning Spanish it doesn't matter if the English translation and its a waste of time discussing it
On another page, with the present tense sentence "La carne es hecha hoy," I translated it as "The meat is fresh today." Taking a cue from the prescriptivism extolled by Eugene Tiffany—or , E. T., as I affectionately call him to myself—I wanted to translate "hecha" as literally as I could while still maintaining the original meaning of the Spanish in its English translation. This interpretation was tricky, since "made" (hecha) brings up connotations of either conception or miraculous creation, and "done" (hecha) is a common English idiom used to say that a food has stopped cooking. By narrowing the meaning of the past participle "hecha" to the time slot of "hoy," I came up with the adjective "fresh." This worked as an acceptable, connotative interpretation of the present tense, although I admit it is a colloquial interpretation because, logically, meat is usually fresh on the day that it is prepared.
That was a few years ago. Now, having learned more Spanish grammar, I would approach this translation differently and more literally. Keeping in mind that "hecha" is a past participle, I would cast around for another past participle that also works in English and would come up with "finished" and "prepared." Then, I would narrow my choice down to "prepared" because, in my opinion, it best combines the two Spanish meanings of "hecha" to convey both "done" and "made." Best of all, taking a part-of-speech approach means that "prepared" can be viewed as a predicate adjective (rather than as a participle) and thus can be used with either present tense verbs or past tense verbs in both languages. For example, "La carne es hecha hoy" (The meat is prepared today) OR "La carne fue hecha hoy" (The meat was prepared today). Parsing these two examples, you can see that using "ser" + a past participle is grammatically equivalent to an English passive voice sentence in any tense. This is key, because the trick to maintaining the same meaning in the English translation is to recognize that someone prepared the meat, and that someone would be the subject of the sentence if said sentence were translated into English active voice.
Unfortunately, idiomatic translation is sometimes unavoidable. However, it is a good work-around when you don't have all of the vocabulary or all of the syntactical knowledge requisite to translate as literally as you might like. Unfortunate, also, is that we all don't have E. T. 's vocabulary or understanding of Spanish grammar rules. While his emphasis on literal translation is commendable because this usually leads to the best translations, I say "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." This is why my admittedly less "correct" interpretation of "hecha" as "fresh" worked connotatively when I translated "La carne es hecha hoy" as "The meat is fresh today." This is also why I advocate that learners take a grammar-based approach that uses the grammar of both languages. This last is something that E. T. has written against, which is a shame because he has so much knowledge to offer about how Spanish actually works, if only he would take the time to explain its "why's" and "how's" through the use of examples and comparisons. All hat no cattle.
Right Danieca, that makes sense. I couldn't understand what was meant by "the meat was made today". The translation duolingo gives is "off the peg" which is what I used, but it was marked as incorrect, which apparently it is.
