We have a cleaning crew that comes every other week, and part of the service is a Spring Cleaning every spring where they are here all damn day. They clean things I didn’t even know we had (seriously, dusting inside the baseboard heat, cleaning the inside of the fridge, everything you can imagine).
Since they are all Brazilian, we communicate via a Google Translate app, where we type each other messages.
Today one of them told me:
“We used bleach to really clean all the white people.”
I’m not dumb, I knew it was a loss in translation. But I couldn’t stop laughing.
Eventually I realized that she was talking about the acres of woodwork (base moldings, door moldings, doors themselves, etc). Now, bleach wouldn’t be my go to for that, but they do all look good.
I don’t know how in Portuguese one gets to “White People” from woodwork, but there you go.
I talk very little(speech thing)
I often text at the doctor’s office if they don’t understand ASL. Or someone is not with me to translate.
Yep. It’s weird to be in front of someone texting to them.
Once I text something like “I’m sick of this whole thing”
Started a whole l-o-n-g conversation about what was making me sick?, where did I hurt?, how did I feel?
I tried to explain it was not “sick” but “aggravated”.
Then I got “Do you need to see the insurance office, or business office”
Nooooooooooo!
I was sick of multiple appointments for the same problem for recheck after recheck. I was trying to complain about that.
This whole interaction took at least 45 minutes. Way more than a regular appointment timespan.
I know I have communication impediments, but still. Ridiculous.
Thankfully, the diabetic clinic has an ASL speaker.
All clinics need them.
I do a lot of the multi-lingual texting / Google translate. Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and an increasing amount of Haitian Kréyol.
It works great if you keep the sentences short, simple, and imperative, avoid slang, and avoid words with multiple meanings. Or at least avoid using a word for its 12th English meaning, rather than its primary English meaning. And don’t much try to have a conversation: “Just the facts, Ma’am” is a decent rule of thumb. I pretend I’m talking to a ~7yo and that seems to get me to write short and simple.
As to the OP, I almost wonder if what the housekeeper meant was they use lots of bleach in white people’s houses, but rather little when cleaning the houses of less-germophobic clients. I’m not suggesting the OP is personally a germophobe; just that perhaps your housekeeper assumes you are based on your ethnicity.
My most irritating recent such text miscommunication was trying to get a delivery to my hotel in Mexico. Zero English at their end, so I’m hacking away in my bad Spanish augmented by Google translate to stretch my vocabulary. We eventually get it all settled as to what and when and price. 45 minutes between their response delays and mine. Tiresome, but success is at hand. Hooray!
Not so fast, Batman! Then comes the bit from them where, no they actually don’t deliver. They’ll send a driver to pick me up and take me to them. Despite my saying at the outset I wanted the stuff delivered to me. Gaah!!
Not a personal experience, but a funny incident that was reported in German media some years ago. A couple from Saxony wanted to book a flight to Porto, Portugal via telephone. Now the Saxon accent is famous for pronouncing hard consonants very softly, so what the person on the other end heard was “We want to book a flight to Bordo”, “Bordo” being homophonous with “Bordeaux”, a city of course in France. Guess where they landed…
At work, one of my co-workers received a call from a woman who wanted to tell us she had a B-cup. She was very insistent about this. My co-worker was like, “…congratulations?” Fortunately, she eventually figured out that the lady was calling to request a courier for pick-up.
There I was having lunch at the cantine in one of the EU buildings in the Capital of the World (that is Luxemburg, in case you were wondering). I was minding my own business while eating sitting at a table that could sit four, two other seats were occupied by two elder female Spaniards that I would call Marujas (a term comparable to the US use of Karens for a kind of person you dislike): a particular type of entitled civil servant, horrible French, and no German, as we shall see. I disliked them, so I ate quietly.
Then a German comes along and asks them: “Ist hier frei?” pointing at the empty chair. One of the Spaniards, being sure that the German can only have asked: “Is this chair occupied?” confidently replied “Oui!”. Because that is what he would ask in Spain: is this chair occupied? ¿está ocupado? Not: is this chair available? ¿está libre? When the German then sat down - she had asked if it was free, and the answer had been yes - the Spaniards were upset and proclaimed so loudly. The German in turn was offended by the unexpected attack, and responded just as loud. This went on for a while.
I could have explained the situation to both sides, but I decided not to. Did I mention I could not stand them? It was funnier seeing them argue and express their indignation without a common language.
My dad was once having lunch with a man in Australia. They were at the end of the meal and were having some nice pie. They were talking about my dad’s job. The man then asked, “How’s the pie?” Dad said it was delicious. This confused the man and when he repeated the question, my dad asked, “This pie?” pointing to his dessert. The guy then said, “No the pie at your job. Do they pie you well?” Laughs all around.
A story was told of a native non-Anglophone who spoke English very well but was confused by one idiom he heard all the time. He asked his American friend, what does it mean to say “having sex”? The somewhat startled friend rather awkwardly explained. The non-native speaker said “That’s what I thought it meant, but then why do you say it when you greet each other?” Utter confusion; total flummoxation. “You know,” the non-native said. “‘Oh for having sex, it’s so good to see you!’”
Heard this (no doubt apocryphal) tale when I was about 9, and still think of it every single time I hear the phrase.
Our Seabee team was in Guatemala doing some humanitarian work after the '76 earthquake. Of all the people on the team only three of us spoke any Spanish. We stayed at a motel and took most of our meals there. A lot of the guys had various degrees of diarrhea, including one man named Jimmy who was really sick for a number of days.
One afternoon I walked into the restaurant to find him sitting at a table with food in front of him, including two plates of fried potatoes.
Me: Hey Jimmy! Feeling better?
Him: Yeah, somewhat, I reckon. (he was a southern boy)
Me: Well you must be, with all that food in front of you.
Him: Yeah, well I keep askin’ this gal for mashed taters and she keeps bringing me fries.
Me: Well that’s kinda weird. You sure she understood you, 'cause that doesn’t sound right.
Him: Yeah, well watch (calls the server over and points at the plate of fries). Quiero mashed taters! he says loudly.
Her: Mas papas?! Mas?!
Him: Si! Mashed taters! (turns to me and says) Now watch, she’s gonna bring more fucking French fries.
I’m sort of the same way. But it’s a hearing thing. More than two or three people and I miss half of what is said. My wife knows of my hearing problems but I still miss some of the stuff she says.
Working from home has solved a bunch of problems for me. I want the written word. And I depend on context and body language a lot.