I have another one… or two
I worked in a large trauma unit in San Diego some time back. A fair number of patients spoke little or no English, so most of the staff spoke “medical Spanish”
Take a deep breath, do you have pain? don’t move, etc.
One night I was to work in the neuro ICU. Part of the routine for head injured patients is to check their level of consciousness every hour. I approached the bedside of my patient, who was struggling mightily to get out of bed. The nurse I would be taking over for was struggling just as hard to keep him in bed, while trying to do the standard assessment, one item being, to ask the patient to open his eyes.
She was shouting at the poor man: “Abierto las puerta!” instead of “abierto los ojos” She was telling him to open the door instead of his eyes.
This is related. One Saturday afternoon we received 2 young men who had been working in the strawberry fields. They spoke not a word of English.
The farmer had, illegally routed chemicals through a water hose. These guys drank from the hose.
We were first told the chemical was an herbicide. Treatment : Charcoal orally, and IV alcohol, to bind the receptor sites.
So, we get them started on their prolonged, controlled drunk.
Except… We got a message that the chemical was an organophosphate… different treatment…
Much different: ipecac, atropine, and laxatives.
So unable to explain (no translator) any of what we were doing, or why, we got them falling down drunk, made them drink nasty black stuff, then made them throw-up and shit their brains out, all while trying to keep them in bed and quiet.
Welcome to the U.S.A.!
I learned this the hard way as a child slowly learning French. I still don’t even know for sure if it was lined up properly, or if I used the correct words; this incident embarrassed me enough to just want to forget the language altogether.
I was about 13 years old, and my French speaking grandmother had a very elderly French speaking friend who needed her cat looked after for the weekend. The thing is, her friend *only * speaks French, she doesn’t know any English at all. That was fine, I thought it would be a great chance for me to try out a little of my French-speaking “skills”.
All went fairly well, until, as I was leaving, I turned around to see her holding her cat in her doorway, waving goodbye to me. So I yelled, at the top of my lungs:
“BAISES TON CHAT!”
She looked horrified. In my naive youth, I thought, maybe she thinks kissing cats is dirty. But he’s such a cute little kitty. So I tried one more time:
“BAISES TON CHAT POUR MOI!”
She hurried inside, and slammed the door. I didn’t get it until my grandmother called me, asking me why I would say such a horrible thing to that nice old woman about her cat. :eek: :o
I’ve told this one before, but it’s too good to pass up the opportunity.
Many years ago when I was travelling in Europe, I was kidnapped, not entirely unwillingly, by a young Viking, and taken to his parents home overlooking the sea on an island in Denmark.
The father, a pleasant and good natured gentleman, spoke almost no English at all, but tried in every way to make me feel comfortable and welcome.
One morning I left my young friend at the dining room table in order to join the older man for coffee in the living room. We sat together at a window and watched the thick fog hover over the sea with just the hint of ferries and boats moving through the mist and in and out of the nearby harbor. It was truly lovely and peaceful.
The father summoned his courage to try to speak my own language to me. Setting his cup down, he turned to me and in perfect English said: “Much fuck this morning.”
I’ve certainly had my share of these, but the worst had to be in Russia. I’d had 3 years of college Russian, but on arrival discovered I could barely string a sentence together because my vocabulary was awful. To remedy this, I tried reading everything in sight.
One day, my (Soviet) roommate came home and found me staring intently at a jar of tomatoes. She asked me what I was doing, and I tried hard to explain using my limited vocabulary. It went something like this:
Roomie: What are you doing?
Me: I’m reading the jar.
Roomie: But why?
Me: I want to know what’s in it, besides tomatoes. (Note: Soviet food labeling laws were much less strict than American ones, so the odds of finding a complete list of ingredients were actually pretty low.)
Roomie: What else would possibly be in it?
Me: [desperately trying to figure out how to say “preservatives,” and well, you speakers of other European languages can probably make a good guess at what I picked] Ummm…ummmm. prezervativy? [which, by the way, means “condoms” in Russian]
Roomie: [loud fits of laughter]
The sad part was that she couldn’t even explain to me what I’d just said, ecause oout of the half-dozen Russian/English dictionaries between the two of us, none of them listed either word. We had to resort to line drawings. Boy, was I glad she was the only one to witness my mortification.
Oh, man, I murder the French language on a daily basis. My (non-English speaking) in-laws turn to me for comedy.
There was the time I was explaining to them how I was making a lamp but instead said I was making light ! Another time they offered me a drink (boire) but I thought they had asked if I wanted to go to the woods (bois) and that was confusing. The worst is my chronic mishandling of the words mouton (sheep), manteau (coat) and menton (chin).
Funny thing: Last night I was folding baby clothes and my husband noticed that the onesies were made by Gerber. Turns out “gerber” means to vomit in French. HA HA!
HAH!
Now, what was he really trying to say?
Spain, 1985.
A bunch of us from the ship were sitting in a club with some locals, a few of them very attractive Spanish ladies. Wanting to make a good impression, when I got up to use the restroom I said, “Yo tengo el bano.”
You see, instead of saying “I am using the restroom,” I told them, “I have the restroom.” For the rest of our time in that club that night, every Spaniard asked me permission to take a piss.
I once ordered a hotel room in German.Instead of having it for three nights(drei Nachte),I’d ordered it for drei Nakte…three naked people.
goo goo g’joob
Heh! The preservatives=condoms confusion also happens in Spanish, as my Mum discovered when inquiring about the contents of a carton of juice in a Spanish supermarket. The correct word is ‘conservantes’.
This is restricted to Iberian Spanish. In Latin America where Spanish has a closer relationship with English, ‘preservativos’ can mean preservatives.
I haven’t been anywhere, so my goof-up was to the person trying to teach me.
My English teacher used to teach Russian until they cut the budget and omitted it. I told her I was interested in learning, so she’d teach me stuff to say for fun.
She didn’t care too much for the Principal, so a couple of lines she taught me to recite for him were: You have no hair & You have a big butt.
I practiced it and came back the next day and proudly announced to her: You have a big, hairy butt.
She said I had even managed to convert hair to hairy correctly, completely by accident.
Ahh, the joys of marrying into another culture and language…
In an effort to prove myself a good and worthy son-in-law, I asked my new MIL what was an appropriate designation for MIL in Malayalam, the family’s native language and one the 13 official langages in India. I must add that Malayalam has 63 different letters, three of which sound like “ah” to me, and two of which sound like “m”. She said what I heard as “call me “ama””. Which I did.
I only found out three months later, from overhearing my BIL mercilessly teasing his Mom, that I had been calling her a “turtle” every time I spoke to her. :o
as best as my wife can get me to hear:
“ah-mah” = turtle
“ammmma” (where a = “a” in hat) = Mom
To their credit, they never once laughed, sniggered, or corrected me.
On anohter, more dangerous, note, my ophtalmologist was regaling me about his Peace Corps service in the mountain of then Persia / now Iran some 30 years ago. This was when local warlords laid down the law…
Apparently the difference in the local language (Parsi?) between hello/good day, and calling someone a vulgar part of the female anatomy is the difference between the -ch sound in “Ich” in german and “ick”… :eek:
I went to Cabo with a group of friends, and we got a chuckle from our rather reserved taxi driver when we asked him to drive us to “Coral Banyo” (coral bathroom) instead of “Coral Baja” (our hotel).
At one point, we had picked up a few empties and take-out boxes from our room and were looking for a trash can or dumpster to toss the garbage into. It was probably the comedy highlight of the week for the staff in the main lobby as we acted out, in pantomime, our visual interpretation of “trash”.
A fellow I know once spent 8 months in Japan as a co-op student. He took an immersion course in Japanese before he left but still had a few problems: according to the stories he e-mailed back, at one point he tried to tell someone that his girlfriend was “a nice girl” and instead described her as “an easy virgin”. (Bit of a head-scratcher when you think about it…) Another time, when asked his opinion of a market district that he had seen for the first time, he said that “everywhere there were many doll-faced cakes.”
From the context of Zoe’s post, it’s reasonable to assume that the “f-word” the man intended to say was fog.
HAHAHAHAHA… this thread is too funny!
I don’t have any stories to share, since I haven’t been anywhere…
A friend had an exchange student at his house for a couple months from Peru. His English was fairly passable except for two words he always transposed.
An exchange when visiting “Hi Carlo, where’s Danny?”
“Hey, what’s up? I just saw him… I think he’s in the chicken. Are you staying for dinner?”
“Don’t know, what are you having?”
“Fried kitchen.”
Actually, yes. Quite a bit.
Spanish professor of mine had a story about a female friend who went on a trip to Mexico. She developed some kind of medical problem serious enough she had to seek a hospital. When she got there, her doctor didn’t speak much English. Fine.
So they have her strip down for an exam and she’s sitting there with basically no clothing on except for a flimsy hospital gown, doesn’t speak a word of Spanish, and feeling incredibly lost.
The doctor walks in, straps on a pair of rubber gloves and keeps asking her “Are you embarassed?”
Well, yes, she was, as a matter of fact.
Guess it took a while to straighten that one out. She kept wondering why he kept poking his finger up her when she actually had a headache.
Twenty some years ago, I went on a two week driving vacation before entering the working world. On the way home, I passed through Montreal. Feeling very cosmopolitan, I had dinner at an outdoor cafe and, not wanting to be the ugly American, tried to order in French. “Un vin blanc, s’il vous plait.”
Complete, utter, blank incomprehension from my French-speaking waitress.
Again, “Un vin blanc.”
Nothing. Rien.
“Vin? Blanc?”
Sigh. So much for my high school French.
“A white wine, please.”
My pronunciation must be ghastly. How can you screw up “vin blanc?”
I’ve had a few fun ones.
When I visit South Africa I’m a walking conversation-piece because so it appears that an American who can speak Afrikaans is a rarity. My BIL asked me one day whether I’d learned the names of the “Big 5” game in Afrikaans yet. So I started to list them.
“Leeu [lion], olifant [guess!], jagsluiperd-”
I stopped as soon as I had said it because I realized what I’d said (confirmed by the uproarious laughter of my in-laws) as soon as it was out of my mouth. Jagluiperd (no S) means Cheetah. If you break it down though, it could be three words*:
Jag - chase
Lui - Lazy
Perd - horse
JagS however, means horny, as in, “I need some lovin’”
*It could also be just two words, luiperd being, unsurprisingly, the word for leopard.
So basically, I said “horny, lazy horse” instead of cheetah.
Oh and Ravenman, the transposed languages happens to me every time I try to speak Spanish. I open my mouth, and say something like “Como esta” only I pronounce it “Hoe gaan dit?”