Saturday, February 04, 2006
Dodgy Translations
A XXX rated salad, a submarine hedgehog and a herd of 5,000 bison rampaging across England's New Forest ...
What are these, the latest Sun headlines? Monty Python story lines? No, just the world bent out of shape by linguistic error.
By popular demand, well, OK, one request, I thought I would share with you some of my favorite moments from my linguistic clanger collection. Actually, I don't believe the list is that enviable, but these have caused the odd giggle.
My own piece de resistance in mangling a foreign language wasn't in Spanish, it was in French. Chatting with an au pair in England - she was French - we discovered that she also spoke a little bit of German, as do I, but not much English.
We further discovered that there was one word we both knew in all three languages. A very useful word really too - Shit.
Well, my French is not that great, so my next comment, meaning to say, "you don't SAY shit in front of the children", actually came out as "don't shit in front of the children".
I am sure she wasn't thinking of doing any such thing!
If there is one piece of advice I can give you for when you will inevitably trip over your new tongue while learning a language, is not to let your errors worry you. Just like a stage act, the show must go on. People generally understand what you meant to say and nobody much is ever offended these days.
(Give or take the odd cartoon episode.)
I shall never forget two old ladies, whom we dubbed "Hinge and Bracket", that we met in Benidorm (of all places), back in 1978. They were enjoying watching the flamingo dancers, while drinking shangri-la, according to them. :)
Spanish is filled with lists of what are called "false friends" - that is words that look like what you think they are going to mean, but which mean something else entirely. One famously - to regress to the scatological theme - being constipado. Which, means to have a stuffed up nose, as in a head cold.
Obvious really, wasn't it? :)
False Friends - Spanish Words That Are Easily Misunderstood
Do a Google search for "false friends" and you'll see that this phenomenon is by no means restricted just to Spanish.
For serious students, Wikipedia has a more technical article on the concept and a multilingual list of false friends here.
Getting back to the clangers ...
As you may (or may not) know, MOST of the time you can safely change a masculine word in Spanish (one that ends in an O) into it's feminine equivalent, simply by changing the last letter to an A. Of course, there are exceptions to this.
So there was the time that a friend of a friend once asked her future mother-in-law for "ensalada de polla". Well the ensalada (salad) part is OK. Pollo is chicken. Unfortunately, polla is not hen, that is gallina. Polla is a part of the male anatomy that one does not normally eat as part of a light summer lunch.
Well, at least not in company of one's future mother-in-law. :)
Screwing with the natural habitat ...
One of my favorite linguistic clangers comes from my days at the newspapers.
What animal is spiky and does a lot of damage to the seabed?
A scuba diving hedgehog, maybe? Well, only maybe. The story, which originally ran in the local Spanish press, talked about the plague of erizo that were damaging the seabed around the south of the island, and indeed erizo is the Spanish word for hedgehog.
But, I had never seen a hedgehog in the south of Tenerife anywhere, much less in the sea (we do have 'em, on land, in the north), so out came the dictionary. Ah, erizo is also the translation of sea urchin, so that would be our plague.
Logical really, both being spiky.
This isn't a problem, in context, but it does mean that you have to read the entire context to get the right meaning.
The funny part is that one of the other English language newspapers obviously didn't read the entire context, because, a couple of weeks after this, their translation of the story appeared, complete with a picture of a hedgehog.
Theirs didn't have a snorkel though! 
Photo Credit: U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service
But, to be fair, even the professionals have off days.
Spanish national news agency EFE used to provide the newspaper I worked for with stories translated into English.
One alarming report claimed a herd of some 5,000 BISON were laying waste to the New Forest in the south of England.
This caused us a laugh, but we knew what the problem was. In Spanish, B's are pronounced a bit like V's and vice versa.
What was really running around the south of England in its thousands were VISÓN, which when translated into English are MINK, let out of a fur farm by animal activists. Still damaging pests, but I think you'd notice the difference if you met one.
As luck would have it on this occasion, we had "our man on the spot", no more than a few hundred yards from a cattle grid into the forest, in New Milton. My late father; always a man capable of maturely assessing a situation and acting accordingly.
He did indeed report the sighting of one bison in the vicinity.
In the bathroom: a wash hand bison (basin).
Labels: Lost in Translation
3 Comments:
Pamela wrote (on
February 05, 2006)
LOL! Polla para llevar could make a great name for a male escort agency!
Volver could be interpreted as "throw up" as in sick, too. :)
My written Spanish is not all that great either. I did study a bit and, actually, my spelling is much better in Spanish than it is in English.
But I also suffer from an English keyboard with this computer. I bought it through my Spanish bank and I asked for English software. They were very kind as to get everything English.
I have discovered that when I write emails in Gmail, it will detect and spellcheck in either English or Spanish automatically. Neat. And it puts in the accents that I have neglected to use. Of course, it couldn't correct a problem like that where the mistake is a real word.
However, I've noticed that many Spanish people don't bother with the accents these days, so people do read what you meant to say from the entire context.
And at least the lack of an "enyay" cleans up a certain word to an innocent ice cream cono. :)
Tenerife Scribbler wrote (on
February 05, 2006)
LOL... Imagery of ice cream coņo... the mind boggles! Perhaps one for another type of blog :D
LOL... well done! My son's done the pollo/a one before, too. He asked for a polla para llevar (take away willy).
My written Spanish is awful, never having formally studied it, and I once wrote "...vamos a volver en un ano" - we are going to return in an anus. In my defence, though, it was an English keyboard!!
(aņo = year, ano = embarrassing clanger)