piques sanos

English translation: Healthy rivalry

GLOSSARY ENTRY (DERIVED FROM QUESTION BELOW)
Spanish term or phrase:piques sanos
English translation:Healthy rivalry
Entered by: Marisa Blachy

17:14 Jul 18, 2020
Spanish to English translations [PRO]
Slang
Spanish term or phrase: piques sanos
This was in an interview with an Amazon (Spain) employee who had had some physical challenges to overcome on the job. The context was that each day when he got stronger it was a "piques sanos" for him. Aside from the literal translation of "healthy bites", is there another meaning? I haven't been able to find much, except it looks like it's a phrase used in soccer.
Marisa Blachy
United States
Local time: 12:10
Healthy rivalry
Explanation:
The term "piques sanos" is used to describe a situation in which a person challenges him/herself to beat somebody or something in a certain competition-like event, but without a rivalry making it be an uncomfortable event. If you challenge a friend of yours to get promoted at work before him/her, and then he/she does while you aren't, you will say "tenemos piques sanos por ascender en nuestro trabajo" ("we have a healthy rivalry about being promoted at work"). That's how you will use this term in Spanish.

However, your context seems a bit different, as you didn't mention if there was somebody from the company the physically impaired person challenging him/her to be better at his job. If that's the case, got for "healthy rivalry". If not, it might be the case that it refers to him/her understanding that whatever was going wrong at work was an important and healthy lesson for him/her to learn in order to improve at his/her position. So something like a "life lesson", a "hard but healthy lesson".

Hope that helps. Good luck with this translation task.
Selected response from:

Alberto Gómez Herrera
Spain
Local time: 19:10
Grading comment
Alberto, Thanks for this explanation. To give you a little context, the man being interviewed had suffered a pretty serious injury in his previous job and so he was pushing himself everyday working at Amazon to get better at his job. The interviewer asked him what motivates him to come to work each day and he used "piques sanos" twice to talk about some of the things that push him at work.
4 KudoZ points were awarded for this answer



Summary of answers provided
5 +1Healthy rivalry
Alberto Gómez Herrera


Discussion entries: 3





  

Answers


1 hr   confidence: Answerer confidence 5/5 peer agreement (net): +1
Healthy rivalry


Explanation:
The term "piques sanos" is used to describe a situation in which a person challenges him/herself to beat somebody or something in a certain competition-like event, but without a rivalry making it be an uncomfortable event. If you challenge a friend of yours to get promoted at work before him/her, and then he/she does while you aren't, you will say "tenemos piques sanos por ascender en nuestro trabajo" ("we have a healthy rivalry about being promoted at work"). That's how you will use this term in Spanish.

However, your context seems a bit different, as you didn't mention if there was somebody from the company the physically impaired person challenging him/her to be better at his job. If that's the case, got for "healthy rivalry". If not, it might be the case that it refers to him/her understanding that whatever was going wrong at work was an important and healthy lesson for him/her to learn in order to improve at his/her position. So something like a "life lesson", a "hard but healthy lesson".

Hope that helps. Good luck with this translation task.

Example sentence(s):
  • Siempre tuvimos piques sanos por conseguir un coche mejor que el otro.
  • We have always had sort of a healthy competition to buy a better car than the other.
Alberto Gómez Herrera
Spain
Local time: 19:10
Works in field
Native speaker of: Native in SpanishSpanish
PRO pts in category: 4
Grading comment
Alberto, Thanks for this explanation. To give you a little context, the man being interviewed had suffered a pretty serious injury in his previous job and so he was pushing himself everyday working at Amazon to get better at his job. The interviewer asked him what motivates him to come to work each day and he used "piques sanos" twice to talk about some of the things that push him at work.

Peer comments on this answer (and responses from the answerer)
agree  neilmac: Neat explanation, good solution :-)
14 hrs
  -> Thank you very much for your comment, neilmac. Providing the best translation solutions to our colleagues is a must to help the world go forward. Wish you a nice weekend.
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