Friday, March 28, 2008

pasar la voz

pasar la voz: give the floor

As in when a speaker is done and wants to name the next person who gets to speak and says, "ahora paso la voz a Amalia" or "I give the floor to Amalia". This is another one of those that sounds really funny with the false cognate in English. Pass the voice? But then regalar el piso sounds pretty weird in Spanish. Ah, the beauty of idiomatic expressions.

2 comments:

José Alejandro Navarrete said...

Actually I think "spread the word" works much better.

And to "give the floor": "dar la palabra".

Sara Koopman said...

sorry for the delayed reply, your comment got caught in the spam filter.

spread the word is great when pasar la voz is used, say, at the top of an email, but not when someone is handing the mike over to someone else and, instead of saying 'voy a dar la palabra', they say, voy a pasar la voz - I was going the other direction if you get my drift.