Upper West Side, Zona Sul, and other tricky subdivisions
Random translation observation:
I was translating some Brazilian Portuguese into English, and the source article was about an earthquake near São Paulo. (See? Brazil does have natural disasters!)
A particular phrase got me thinking: a zona leste de São Paulo meaning something like “the Eastern Zone of São Paulo.” That’s a pretty tricky thing to translate―you don’t really talk about the “Eastern Zone” of a city in English.
In the States, you might talk about the “Upper East Side” of New York, or the “South Side” of Chicago, or “Northwest” (sometimes just “NW”) in DC. My Brazilo-Londonian homey Carlos tells me that zones in London have numbers, so you talk about “Zone 5,” etc.
And then there are those arrondissements in Paris, which are numbered like an escargot.
So does “The East Side of São Paulo” work as a translation for “a zona leste de São Paulo”? Sounds okay to me, actually.
I’d be curious to know about the ways that other cities are subdivided.
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“East side” sounds fine to me. Australian cities (or at least Sydney and Perth) have “western suburbs” and “eastern suburbs” [1] etc. although “suburb” doesn’t mean the same as it does in USian english - it’s more “neighborhood” than “residential outskirts”. Perth also has “north of river” and “south of river”, based around the Swan River which fairly neatly divides the city.
[1] Amusingly, the eastern and western suburbs have opposite connotations in Perth and Sydney, probably since they’re on opposite coasts.
Lisbon does not have such official designations. There are the designations like downtown and uptown (baixa, alta de Lisboa), and it is now common to refer the Lisboa Oriental to a renewed part of the city at the east. The city (quite small, being surrounded by other cities) and suburban regions are called Grande Lisboa (Big Lisbon).
To me as a European, terms like “East Side” and “West Side” sound very North American: something you’d hear in an American film (or is it movie?) but not from the people around you. I would rather keep the local flair (”the Eastern zone of São Paulo”) or do something completely neutral (”the eastern districts of São Paulo”) but I see no need for making it sound like it’s in the US when it isn’t. Unless of course that was the desired effect. Which I doubt.
Zürich, Switzerland, is divided into 12 numbered districts, or into 34 quarters, named after former villages and small towns - now incorporated into Zürich - or after geographical features.
This German Wikipedia page shows districts (left), quarters (middle) and zip codes (right):
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtteile_der_Stadt_Z%C3%BCrich.
But we also refer to the Districts 11+12 as “Zürich Nord” or ti 4,5 and 8 as “Zürich West”. Conversely, I’ve never heard anyone refer to the South or East of Zurich by compass direction.
For further confusion, in Dialect, “Züri West” doesn’t only refer to the West side of Zurich, but is also a nickname for the city of Berne , and the the name of a Bernese rock band.
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