Dried fruit - a surprisingly explosive linguistic minefield

Recently I had to translate documents for a large Spanish company specialising in olive oil, dried fruit, nuts and the like. It was an enjoyable job, and made a refreshing change from the rather swollen academic Spanish that sometimes passes across my desk. One of the great things about translating is that it takes you into the minutiae of some recondite corner of the world, a corner which you are obliged to research and in which you can eventually boast a modicum of expertise - at least until your next translation when, if you are like me, you promptly forget all you have learnt. Who knew for example that in California they grow a variety of walnut called the Jumbo Hartley? Not me, and I like to think I know more than most about things named Hartley.

Translating is a perilous activity, admittedly not in the literal sense of putting life and limb in peril, but it is fraught with dangers nonetheless. Shepherding a sentence across the frontier from Spanish into English (or any other language combination, I imagine) might seem a straightforward task if you have never done it, but in reality hazards abound. You have to traverse a sort of linguistic no-man's land, false friends to the left of you, translation traps to the right of you, a host of hidden munition at every turn just waiting to blow up in your face. In my innocence I thought dried fruit would be a gentle stroll in the park. How wrong can one be?

Take for instance the expression frutos secos. Frutos are fruit, seco means dry, ergo it seems a fairly safe to assume that frutos secos equate to dried fruit - raisins, sultanas and so on. But wait. Before planting a size-10 hobnailed boot on that oh-so-inviting patch of green sward, let us pause. Every Spanish high street it seems boasts at least one shop specialising in frutos secos: they are virtually a Spanish institution. Cross the threshold of such an establishment however and you are liable to be confronted by mounds and mounds of nuts and seeds - walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts and sunflower seeds in particular - as well as things that in English would come under the heading of dried fruit - dried apricots and the like. The Spanish concept of frutos secos is therefore immediately revealed as broader than the English concept of dried fruit - arguably it equates not so much to dried fruit as dry fruit, a category that does not exist per se in English. Nuts and seeds could not be included in dried fruit in English because although they might be fruit (depending on how narrowly one defines fruit) they are not (normally) dried.

Unhelpfully, my edition of Collins Spanish-English Dictionary (the fifth, published in 1997) does not have an entry for frutos secos; it does however declare that frutas secas are dried fruit. The plot thickens, the translator's brain coagulates. Why are there both frutos and frutas in Spanish? Is there any difference? Why are frutas secas dried fruit, while frutos secos include nuts? My fourth edition of the Oxford Spanish Dictionary, 2008, is somewhat more helpful; for frutos secos it gives 'nuts and dried fruit' while for fruta seca it agrees with Collins in giving 'dried fruit'. If you look up 'nut' in the English section of the Oxford you find fruto seco, whereas Collins translates 'nut' as nuez. It's a minefield all right. One senses that that innocent-looking prune lurking round the corner is primed to explode at any moment.

Can Wikipedia clarify the situation? Search for 'dried fruit' in the English section and you will find 'Dried fruit is fruit from which the majority of the original water content has been removed either naturally, through sun drying, or through the use of specialized dryers or dehydrators', and goes on to list raisins, dates, prunes etc. as examples, all of which seems fair enough until you notice an announcement at the top that warns 'The neutrality of this article is disputed.' Does the dreaded curse of the dried fruit afflict Wikipedia too? Slightly confusingly the article is accompanied by a photograph of a plate holding dried fruit and nuts. Exactly the same photo is used to illustrate the article in Spanish on fruto seco. Curiouser and curiouser. However, some headway through the minefield is made upon reading the first sentence of the article: 'Los frutos secos son llamados así porque todos tienen una característica en común: en su composición natural (sin manipulación humana) tienen menos de un 50% de agua.' ('Frutos secos are known as such because they all have one thing in common: in their natural state (without human manipulation) they contain less than 50% water.') Hurrah! The 'dry fruit' theory gains corroboration.

But this raises just as many questions as it answers. Is it not rather arbitrary to declare that the cut-off point to qualify as un fruto seco is 50% water? A fruit with 49% water is thus seco, but raise its water level only slightly and it suddenly becomes, what? Húmedo? Jugoso? Surely there are some big, fat grapes swollen by rainfall that are over 50% water - are these then not frutos secos? Conversely an apple under 50% water would apparently qualify as fruto seco. Are they frutos secos when they are still on the plant, or do they only qualify for this description once they have been picked and more water has been removed? A certain degree of arbitrariness in language is no doubt inevitable but did Plato not enjoin us to carve nature at the joints? This seems to be rather a case of carving nature half way up the femur.

Does any of this matter, you may be asking. Well, yes, if you are a translator it does. An English-speaking internet user who clicks on a button marked 'Dried fruit' and is then taken to a page about almonds is liable to get rather confused. If he or she concludes that the company responsible for the website does not know its fig from its elbow, everyone emerges worse off. We would all do well to tread lightly among the walnuts.

So, depending on the context, frutos secos could be translated as 'nuts' or 'nuts and dried fruit' or 'nuts and dried fruit and seeds' or in fact any permutation of nuts, dried fruit and seeds. Those with nut allergies are probably well advised to steer clear of them just in case.