One of my favourite Spanish expressions is mucho ruido y pocas nueces, which literally means 'lots of noise and very few nuts', but is usually translated as 'much ado about nothing' - indeed it is used as the Spanish title of Shakespeare's play. Another possible translation, also from Shakespeare, this time Macbeth, might be 'full of sound and fury, signifying nothing'.
Does this however capture all the texture of the Spanish phrase? Probably not. 'Much ado about nothing' means something along the lines of a lot of fuss with no justification, whereas mucho ruido y pocas nueces arguably has a richer meaning.
The image it conjures up in my mind - I have no idea whether this has any basis in reality - is that of walnut sellers (nueces being nuts generally, but specifically walnuts) trying to tempt people into buying their wares by giving them an ostentatious shake (the nuts that is, not the people). The punters, forgetting perhaps that the larger the kernel the less noise it makes rattling around in its shell, are persuaded into parting with their money, only to find that the contents are disappointingly small and hard, hence the racket. The key idea seems to be the disparity between what is promised or expected on the one hand and what is actually delivered on the other, and the disappointment arising as a result. On this reading a better translation might be something like 'promising much and delivering little'.
I have tried to substantiate this theory by looking at online Spanish concordances. This was the only freely accessible one I could find, and it seems to have no samples of the 'mucho ruido y pocas nueces' phrase (can anyone point me in the direction of a better Spanish concordance on the internet?). So lacking a concordance I did a completely unscientific search of the El Pais website. Many of the results are references to Shakespeare's play, while in others the 'much ado about nothing' translation could be used perfectly well. But at least one seems to support the 'promising much and delivering little' interpretation:
[in a report on a bullfight]...El quinto [toro], quizás el de mejor pintura y más en tipo, pareció prometer algo más. Pero tampoco. Sin humillar, ahora voy y ahora me paro, acabó por ser toro ramplón. A su altura estuvo Juan Bautista: también vulgar. Mucho oropel, bastante ruido, pero nueces ni una.
...which might be translated as...
The fifth [bull], perhaps the finest-looking and the fittest, seemed to promise rather more. Not a bit of it. More a case of willing to wound and yet afraid to strike, 'now you see me, now you don't, in the end I'm just a common or garden bull'. Juan Bautista, similarly vulgar, fell into the same category. Plenty of flashiness, lots of bombast, but nothing to show for it.
Wiktionary gives 'all bark and no bite' as a translation, which has its merits, although it seems to emphasise threats at the expense of promises.
Ultimately perhaps no translation is entirely satisfactory, which tends to be the way with translating. If I were forced to choose, I might go for something like 'plenty of show and precious little substance', which seems to capture the meaning quite well but has the drawback of not being a well-known saying. Any other suggestions?
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