I am putting together a blog post about FAMILY VOCABULARY and came across something disturbing...😅
👉🏻 EN/SP online translators and dictionaries seem to have a different take on the concept of "stepfamily".
Let's see why...👇🏻
According to @CambridgeWords, "stepfamily" is "a family that is formed by two people and the child or children of one or both of them from a previous relationship".
Okay. So far so good.
But...
According to wordreference.com, "stepfamily" translates as "familia política".
But in Spanish, "familia política" only refers to your "family-in-law" and not your "stepfather" or "stepmother", for example.
In fact, @RAEinforma says... (image)
But wait... there's more...
@RAEinforma doesn't mention a single case of "stepfamily" like "hijastro/stepson" or "padrastro/stepfather", just cases of "family-in-law" like "daughter-in-law/nuera" or "father-in-law/suegro".
But there's more...
translate.google.com is even drunker than WordReference...
For them, "stepfamily" = "familia adoptiva" 🤪
But we certainly don't say things like "padre adoptivo" instead of "padrastro".
It would sound VERY weird, at least in Spain.
So my conclusion is that in Spanish...
We don't have a direct translation of "stepfamily". 🤯
Because words like "hijastra" or "madrastra" are not part of what we call "familia política".
Maybe, legally they are, but not in regular speech when talking about kinship.
@YentelmanBlog Something tells me you have something to say about this. 🙂