Calling all polyglots! Funny translations needed for answering machine.

Okay, I’ll bite, being new… Why do you need the Aussie accent to sound like a foreign language?

I about died when I read aloud the suggestion from Inigo Montoya!!!

You have some real decisions here about what to choose!!

No particular reason, bdandhr. I rotate my messages frequently and it would be, I dunno, whimsical and silly to treat some impenetrable Aussie slang as “another language.”

One time I growled incomprehensibly like Ooka the Mok (from Thundarr the Barbarian) and called it “a translation into Mok, for the benefit of my friends who speak Mok.”

Australian is practically a foreign language already. :slight_smile: Just pick some of the juicier slang. (I still don’t know what a ‘hoon’ is, for example…)

And if you want something really obscure, you could try Tokipona: ike li kama = bad-thing it comes-or-occurs = shit happens.

Damn, I’m several hours slow. :frowning:

My parents actually speak some Arabic. Apparently I never learned.

Finnish:

En ole kotona juuri nyt. Ole hyvä ja jätä viesti. = I’m not home right now. Please leave a message.

Olen eksynyt jättimäiseen emmentaljuustoon. Jätä viesti niin palaan asiaan heti, kun olen syönyt tieni ulos. = I have gotten lost in a gigantic piece of Swiss cheese. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I’ve eaten my way out.

Mitä? Pääskynen kuljettamassa kookospähkinää?! = What? A swallow carrying a coconut?!

Aargh! Jalkani! Se järsii jalkaani! = Aargh! My leg! It’s gnawing on my leg!

Vesihiisi sihisi hississä. = The water spirit hissed in the elevator. A Finnish tongue twister, sometimes used in phoniatrics to practise the ‘s’ sound.

Hope those are helpful… :slight_smile:

Incidentally, some pronunciation guides:

  • a word in Finnish is pronounced like it’s spelled 99% of the time.
  • there’s a difference between single and double consonants (‘mato’ is worm, ‘matto’ is carpet) and single and double vowels (‘kuusi’ means six, ‘kusi’ means piss) --so make the distinction.

vowels:

  • The ‘a’ sound is like the long ‘a’ in ‘far’.
  • ‘ä’ is like the ‘a’ sound in ‘cat’.
  • ‘e’ is like in ‘met’.
  • ‘i’ is like the ‘ey’ sound in ‘key’.
  • ‘o’ is pretty much like in English, but shorter, almost like it’s cut short before the end
  • ‘u’ is like the ‘oe’ in shoe.
  • ‘y’ and ‘ö’ are two sounds which I don’t think exist in English. Y: start saying ‘eeeee’ in English and then purse your lips while continuing to make the sound. What you’ll get is pretty close to the ‘y’ sound. Ö is kind of like the ‘e’ sound at the end of ‘matter’ or ‘cover’, but not really.

Japanese:
messeiji o nokoshite kudasai: please leave a message.

kaijyuu-nyuu ga anmari oisikunai: monster-milk doesn’t taste very good.

That first word should be messeji rather than messeiji. same pronunciation, just shorter.

I think I might want to put some of these on my answering machine. I’ve been confusing the telemarketers with Esperanto long enough. :slight_smile:

auRa, what about the Finnish consonants? Is ‘j’ like English y?

Finnish: extremely cool langiage. Want to go back to Helsinki. :: heavy sigh ::