Anyone here speak Portuguese and/or Spanish?

I was reading a novel which had the following sentence untranslated: "Quem fode p'ra fazer-me". It must include an idiom or slang of some sort, as the words "fode" and "p'ra" are not translated in any website that I can find. It's Portuguese, but it may be close enough to Spanish to figure it out - going off Latin I was able to get the gist of the sentence.

 

I see fazer-me and think its from Star Trek.

 

Fozzy Bear shot who?!

-sj loves kevin spacey

 

me no habenero a spaniel

 

Donde esta usted?

 

The p'ra I imagine is slang for "para" meaning "for" and the fazer-me I imagine is whatever the infinitive "fazer" means and then "to me." As for the rest, you're on your own because it looks nothing like anything I've ever seen in Spanish.


Edit: Hahaha okay, my very cursory translation of it would be "Who screws for doing me?"

 

Wait just a sec... I think I know what novel you're talking about. One of the later Orson Scott Card Enderverse novels-- Children of the Mind, perhaps? If so, I think I know what you're talking about and what it means-- I'm pretty sure it's essentially, 'who's my real father?'

Hope that helps

 

Quem is likely an pronoun of some sort, I'm thinking "who" for this situation. "Fazer" likely comes from "facio" in Latin, which is to make. So we have "Who ___ ___ make me" or if you're right about the infinitive part, then "Who ___ ____ to make me". Which suggests that if p'ra is a slang pronunciation of para or pera and ends up meaning "for", fode's a verb of some sort.

EDIT:

Speaker for the Dead, actually. And I know from the context that that is what it meant, but the specific wording he used to ask this question shocked the entire crowd and caused his own brother to get ready to beat his ass. He said SOMETHING messed up.

 

*nods*

I always figured it was a fairly blunt way of saying it (more bluntly than I put it), and the subject was rather touchy... plus his brother didn't have the most controlled temper to begin with, if I recall. I know you're looking for specific confirmation, though, yeah.

 

Well actually Olhado was the most even tempered character of all the children, which is what made his response of leaping to his feat with doubled fists all the more indicative of somn messed up.

 

Yeah, like I said, haven't read that book in a while, that's probably showing... maybe I'll see if I can find it and re-read that passage...

 

I've read the book lately and I can't remember that part

 

Well, combining everything that has been said thus far in the thread, perhaps it means something along the lines of "Who had sex to make me?"

Warrior_of_Mandalore Strikes Again!

 

It translates to "5/5 mics," iirc.

 

That isn't Spanish.

 

No it's not. They speak Portugese.

 

That's what I was thinking after Espy told me that fode was translated by an online translator as the crude word "screwed". P'ra is the only thing remaining, although I'm not sure what the impact will be of finding out what the contraction is missing. I would think, linguistically, that an e sound would be dropped in slang, but that may be colored by my experience as an English speaker. Several Spanish speakers have suggested to me that it could be a shortened form of "para", dropping an a sound, which doesn't strike me the right way but is based off of a closer language to Portuguese than the Latin I know. The closest to pera I've found in online dictionaries is "perante" meaning above(missionary style?). Para, on the other hand, means "for" - "Who screwed for to make me" or changing fazer out of the infinitive and instead making it more reminiscent of a subjunctive purpose clause, "Who screwed for (the purpose of) making me". Who screwed...who? The object of the verb is conspicuously absent, although in other languages these things are often implied.

Right now I have: "Who screwed ___ to make me", which assumes that my use of "facio" was correct even though most translators translate fazer as "do", which in context would make less sense.

 

Portugese is a Latin language, whilst English is Germanic. Not every grammar construction must be translatable word-by-word.

Think about it.

 

In Spanish, "para" is used to express purpose and does not take the subjunctive. I think that is the most likely translation.

Though the translated "to screw" is a transitive verb, the original Portuguese verb does not necessarily take a direct object.

And a single word meaning "do" and "make" makes sense because both the Latin "facere" and the Spanish "hacer" have both meanings.

Warrior_of_Mandalore Strikes Again!

 

Damn Brazilians from outer space interacting with talking pigs who turn into talking trees.

 

Fixed.

 

Hey, Speaker of the Dead was pretty good. Xenocide (who cares about that Chinese girl?) and Children of the Mind killed it.

And even though Card's political views got kinda annoying in the sequels, the Ender's Shadow series was also pretty good.

 

I'll actually even say I was still mildly entertained through Xenocide. But Children of the Mind was just painful.

I hope so. It was just Ender's Game. This was basically how they were written:

Ender's Game- "Ender paused, then sighed, hesitant to give the command."

Ender's Shadow- "I watched as Ender paused, then sighed, hesitant to give the command."

 

Not really. I remember that a relatively small portion of the book was actually devoted to retelling events in Ender's Game. A lot of it was things that Ender hadn't witnessed and/or things from Bean's own life (i.e. Rotterdam, Achilles coming to Battle School after Ender had left).

 

Yeah, except all that part (anything with Achilles) was ferociously stupid.