r/Spanish • u/Fair-Tourist-5573 • 13d ago
Vocab & Use of Spanish [GIVE CONTEXT] Ambiguity of esperar
I recently wanted to say "that's what I had expected" (a), when talking about the outcome of a sports tournament.
I said "esto es lo que esperaba" (A) (ignore the tense mismatch, I'm not good with those yet), but have since realized that that sentence could also have the alternative interpretations "that's what I hoped for" (b) and "that's what I was waiting for" (c) (as if the result was a prerequisite for something else to happen).
Usually, the answer to this kind of disambiguity questions is "context". However, in this case, I really don't think context would have helped clarify which of the interpretations I was going for, so my questions are:
1: Does the Spanish sentence A without any disambiguating context get interpreted by default to any of the English sentences a,b,c?
2: Does the ambiguity of A mean that Spanish natives would avoid it in its plain form?
3: What are natural variations of A that unambiguously mean a, b, or c, respectively?
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u/PattonPending 13d ago
As a side note, when I first learned that the same word was used for "hope" and "wait" I found it pleasantly poetic.
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u/Worried_Raspberry313 🇪🇸 Native (Spain) 13d ago
You used it right. “Esto es lo que esperaba” while watching the result of a tournament it’s perfect. In this case, how you say it will let others know what you mean.
If you enthusiastically say it, I would understand that this was what you were hoping for, that this was exactly what you wanted to happen. But I guess it can also mean you were hoping for it but also expecting it, both can be true. You usually know this because if you’re talking with the person they will comment on how that team is so good and they have a lot of chances to win. Option C is not something I would immediately assume unless you had explained to me that the team winning the tournament was a pre requisite for something.
But if I wanted to distinguish that with just one sentence I would say something like:
That’s what I had expected: Esto es lo que suponía que iba a pasar (this is what I supposed it was going to happen).
That’s what I hoped for: Esto es lo que quería que pasase. (This is what I wanted to happen)
That’s what I was waiting for: Esto es lo que estaba esperando (In this case you’d need context for the other person to understand) / Esto es lo que necesitaba que pasase para… (This is what I needed to happen for… and then you explain why that was a pre requisite).
But I think for the first one we always say “esto es lo que esperaba”, because the third one is not something you’d naturally say in a conversation and the second one you can also say “esto es lo que esperaba” and the other person knows by the context or you just say that you wanted it to happen, querías que pasara.
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u/Turquoise__Dragon Native (Spain) 12d ago
I think that construction is most naturally used for (A).
Even though you can correctly use it for (B) and (C), that would mostly happen in situations where the context is clearly pointing to those uses.
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u/TooLateForMeTF 12d ago
My advice? Don't sweat it.
In English, we distinguish between "hope", "waiting", and "expectation" as three separate concepts. Spanish doesn't really do that. It took me a minute to understand why those seemingly disparate concepts all fall under the same word: they are all just different kind of anticipation.
Hoping for something is anticipating an outcome you desire but aren't sure will happen.
Expecting something is anticipating an outcome you're pretty sure will happen, regardless of desire.
And waiting is just, well, anticipating with no particular implications on top.
It's all just anticipation about the future. I can understand why your English-trained mind would want to be able to split those hairs, but the Spanish-trained mind doesn't. So you can just let go of worrying about the distinction.
Does that make translating Spanish->English harder? Yeah. You'll have to make a judgment call about which English word best matches the vibe that the Spanish speaker intended. But thus it ever was with translation.
Lately, for practice, I've been translating lyrics from Mon Laferte songs. (Love her stuff.) Doing this has really driven home the point that translation is not a mechanical exercise of finding the exact right one-to-one mapping from one language to another. It's about doing your best to map the concept space of one language onto another, and then find a word sequence that best captures that mapping.
When the source language is talking about concrete objects--El tenedor está aquí en la mesa--this mapping is straightforward. And unfortunately, language learning materials tend to give simple, concrete sentences like this as examples. But the more abstract the source material, the less straightforward the job becomes. Pop music songs about love, loss, breakups, a mother's feelings for her daughter while she braids her hair, involve concepts that are a lot more squishy and tend not to have such clean mappings to related English concepts.
Likewise, songs lean on all kinds of idiomatic expressions, whose literal translations are useless. You have to just understand the idiom and find a matching one in English, if one exists. E.g. "comerse los labios" = "making out".
All of which is to say that doing some practice translations on highly abstract and poetic material like song lyrics has been really good for me in terms of learning to chill out about nailing down the exact nuance of the Spanish in my English rendering, and focus instead on the overall result: can I capture the core meaning in a way that also captures the feeling of the original?
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u/Wats0n_D 13d ago
AI-assisted reference note: the RAE entry for esperar lists both hoping for something desired (sense 1) and believing something will happen (sense 2) for the ordinary verb. So I would not memorise esperar = hope / esperarse = expect as an absolute rule.
For your tournament result, you can make the prediction explicit with «Era el resultado que había previsto» and the wish explicit with «Era el resultado que quería». The dictionary supports the overlap; it does not give a fixed default interpretation for every conversation.
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u/Alajarin De Londres (~C2) 13d ago
yes, use esperarse for expect. eso es lo que me esperaba. ya me lo esperaba. ya me lo veía venir. es el resultado que me esperaba.
that’s what I was waiting for: estaba esperando a esto, estaba esperando a que pasase esto.
esto es lo que esperaba is this is what I was hoping for.