THE BALLSY DICTIONARY · SECOND EDITION (THE FIRST WAS RUDE)
TELLY-TO-SPANISH.
SPANISH-TO-SCHEDULE.
Your GCSE Spanish will get you a beer. It will not get you a road closure. Before you land in Málaga with a call sheet and a dream, learn the words that will actually decide whether your shoot happens — translated by people who've spent twelve years finding out the hard way so you don't have to.
VOLUME ONE 🇪🇸
✨ WORDS THAT WILL RUIN YOUR SCHEDULE.
MAÑANA
✨ Literal: "tomorrow"
Actual: "at some point before the heat death of the universe, possibly." Under no circumstances put mañana in a call sheet. We translate mañana into actual dates with actual times. It's basically witchcraft and we charge accordingly.
TRANQUILO
✨ Literal: "calm down"
Actual: what you'll be told, warmly, while your location double-books itself. The trick is knowing when tranquilo means "genuinely relax, it's handled" and when it means "start making calls immediately". We speak fluent tranquilo. Both dialects.
SIESTA
✨ Literal: "nap"
Actual: the hours of 2pm–5pm, during which the town hall, the police station and your permit all cease to exist. Schedule around it or perish. We schedule around it. Nobody's perished yet.
FIESTA
✨ Literal: "party"
Actual: a surprise national holiday you didn't know existed, honouring a saint you've never heard of, closing every shop within fifty miles of your unit base. There are more of these than you'd believe. We keep the calendar. It once involved 300 prawns.
SIN PROBLEMA
✨ Literal: "no problem"
Actual: anywhere between "genuinely no problem" and "enormous problem I've decided is now yours". Delivered identically in both cases, with a smile. Telling them apart is not a language skill, it's a relationship skill. Twelve years. We can tell.
EL PAPELEO
✨ Literal: "the paperwork"
Actual: a competitive sport with no published rules, played entirely in triplicate. Also, weirdly, our love language. You bring the shoot, we'll bring the stamps.
EL GUAPO
✨ Literal: "the handsome one"
Actual: our Pomeranian. What every waiter, pensioner and traffic warden in Fuengirola calls Bear, unprompted, while he prances past like it's his farewell tour. You will hear it forty times per shoot day. He hears it too. That's the problem. See exhibit A.
VOLUME TWO 📺
✨ ENGLISH-TO-ENGLISH. FOR THE EXECS.
✨ "We've found a local guy"
Translation: someone's cousin has a van and a lanyard from 2019. See our Production 999 page, because you will need it, probably on a Thursday.
✨ "The budget's tight"
Translation: the budget is fine, someone just spent the contingency on a drone shot of a marina. Good news: Andalucía makes budgets breathe. Better news: we already own the drone permits.
✨ "We'll grab it in the edit"
Translation: nobody got the shot. With 320 days of sun and a fixer who's also a creative director watching the monitor, you get the shot. Revolutionary concept, we know.
✨ "Can you just...?"
Translation: an impossible request is coming. Our favourite kind. The sentence has ended in prawns, goats, road closures and a marquee. The answer's been yes every time. Annoyingly for our stress levels, it's on the record now.
FLUENT IN 48 HOURS?
✨ SKIP THE DUOLINGO OWL. 🦉 HIRE THE PEACH. 🍑
Or just bring us. English, Spanish, and the crucial third language of Andalusian town-hall bureaucracy — spoken fluently, simultaneously, occasionally at volume.
HABLA WITH US