“In Spain we call it soledad,” sang Rigoberta Bandini in 2020. But lately, it seems that the media and government institutions in Spain are actually calling it “soledad no deseada” as a way of differentiating between voluntary versus involuntary solitude. Set that to music, someone!
While it’s true that translating and reviewing translations sometimes brings out the cranky editor in me, and I enjoy poking fun at new jargon that I find is often unnecessary (think products described as “local,” “de proximidad,” and “de kilómetro 0” all in the same sentence, probably with “de territori” thrown in there as well in Catalan), I’m not actually opposed to the “soledad no deseada” buzzphrase. It makes sense: we shouldn’t stigmatize being alone per se; we should only see it as a problem if the people who are alone are unhappy about being alone. Spanish needs to make this distinction because “soledad” is not inherently negative. It can be used in melancholy contexts, as in the case of Bandini’s song, but it can just as easily be described as a desirable state, as in Rosas en el mar: “La soledad quiero buscar/Para poder vivir en paz.” So, although “soledad no deseada” may seem a bit artificial at first, and I don’t think it’s being used by the proverbial man on the street yet, it is filling a genuine vacuum in the language.
A search for “soledad no deseada” on the Corpus del Español shows a sharp uptick in use of the term starting in 2019. It also appears to be most common in peninsular Spanish.
What does bother me is the proliferation of literal translations of this phrase into English as “unwanted loneliness,” given that we do in fact have a single word that refers specifically to a state of unhappiness as a result of being alone: loneliness. Loneliness in English is unwanted by definition; if you translate the Rosas en el mar lyric as “I want to find loneliness/To be able to live in peace,” the word choice will immediately strike a native speaker as jarring. (In Peggy March’s cover, it became “I wish I knew a place to hide, a quiet place beyond the tide.”) If you Google “unwanted loneliness,” you’ll find that most of the hits are translations or pieces written by non-native speakers. In the case of the few that aren’t, such as this Forbes article, there is usually an explicit contrast being made, which makes the phrase less redundant: “Hence it is normal to want to be alone for reasons like creativity, self-insight, and relaxation. But unwanted loneliness is the problem.” (Note that the positive sort of loneliness is not referred to as “loneliness” at all, but rather “being alone.”)
I’m not pretending to be the first translator who has realized this. The translators at the Observatorio Estatal de la Soledad no Deseada, for example, knew to brand the organization as “The State Observatory of Loneliness” in English. But anyone can fall into the “unwanted loneliness” trap. In the age of machine translation post-editing, even a good MT engine, such as DeepL, often misses this nuanced difference between languages and goes for the literal translation as its default. Linguists who are used to scanning MT output for major issues are likely to overlook “unwanted loneliness,” because it doesn’t jump out as awkward or unidiomatic. It’s a perfectly grammatical, understandable phrase. It’s just redundant. And if you have a tight deadline to post-edit a long document and are being paid the laughable rates that are typical of Spanish LSPs, contemplating whether a phrase is redundant just isn’t going to be a priority.
It’s understandable, then, that unwanted “unwanted”s are sneaking into English translations. But fighting inertia and taking them out is one of those details that can give a translation a human touch. It reflects the fact that—of all things!—different languages work differently, and that while Spanish has had to come up with a phrase to reflect a certain reality, English already had a single word for it. This isn’t a value judgement, of course; in many cases the situation is reversed. Even though English is generally more concise than Spanish, translators in all language combinations must often resort to using a phrase to express a concept for which the source language has a single word, and into-English translators are no exception. “Conciliar,” for example, is a delightfully compact word that must often be rendered as the clunky “achieve a work-life balance” in English. And let’s not get into the notoriously tricky matter of how to translate “solidaridad” and its adjectival forms. All the more reason, then, to celebrate when the target language gives us a more succinct way to express the source-language concept. So let’s fight loneliness as one of the problems facing modern-day society, and embrace “loneliness” as a translation solution.
Lena Greenberg 