Contrary to what most British professionals assume, interpreting a technical meeting about infrastructure is often simpler than interpreting the lunch that follows it.

In a meeting about bridges, water supply, or electrical grids, the Spanish is largely standardised across Latin America. The vocabulary is technical, neutral, and consistent whether the delegation is from Mexico City, Bogota, Santiago, or Buenos Aires.

Come lunch, all of that goes out the window.

The situation

One of my translation professors at university used to explain linguistic variety through clothing. The more intimate the garment, the more regional words exist for it. A coat is a coat everywhere. But ask for underwear in ten different Spanish-speaking countries and you will get ten different words and ten different reactions to the ones you choose.

Food works the same way. Beetroot is betabel in Mexico, betarraga in Chile, and remolacha in most other countries. Sweet potatoes are boniatos in Uruguay and Spain, camotes in Central America, and batatas almost everywhere else. The word for a bread roll changes every few hundred kilometres.

In a room with a Mexican, a Chilean, and an Argentine, the lunch menu alone can produce a quiet, low-level confusion that nobody mentions and everybody navigates privately. The British host, watching a conversation that appears to be running smoothly, has no idea this is happening.

The friction