In the I Love Lucy episode “Paris at Last,” Lucy is rescued from arrest by an elaborate translation effort by Ricky, two Paris policemen, and a third man who helps. I missed the first part of this scene; who is this man ( he speaks German and Spanish) and why is he in the Paris police station?
He’s a drunk who was in the lockup for public intoxication (note that he’s a bit shaky on his feet while translating). It’s one of my favorite scenes in I Love Lucy.
Thanx 
Here’s the clip by the way http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x186ihw_i-love-lucy-down-the-line-of-translation_tv
I think “the other cop” over does it a little.
There was a real-life example of something like this on the Lewis and Clark expedition, when they wanted to negotiate with Cameahwait, a Shoshone Indian. The captains, Lewis and Clark, both spoke only English. So Lewis spoke to Private Francois Labiche, who spoke both English and French. He in turn spoke in French to the trapper Toissaint Charbonneau, who in turn spoke in Hidatsa to his wife Sacagawea, who in turn spoke in Shoshone to Cameahwait.
Thanks…and I read about a similar incident in California history in the *Sunset * Magazine book about San Francisco. “A Tartar had been accused of assault by a Spaniard. But proceedings were delayed because the Tartar and his witnesses could not speak English. At last a Tartar named Arghat was discovered who could speak Chinese, and a Chinese named Alab who could speak Spanish. So the trial proceeded in four languages.”
An somewhat simpler but weirder incident happened at work where we had to get a German to translate Mancunian marble-mouth speech to a Frenchman who could understand regular English. I’ve had to do that translation myself for other Americans who just can’t understand the guy.
Does he sound like Daphne Moon? 
Sort of, but she’s far easier to comprehend. And then on top of that he complains about the way the Scots talk.
All this reminds me of a movie I watched on tv when I was a kid. It was a comedic spy movie, possibly filmed in the 1960s. At a certain point an Albanian assassin attacks our hero, but ends up mortally wounded. They try to interrogate him at the hospital, but they are in a hurry, and they don’t have at hand anybody who can translate from Albanian to Englsh. So they end up recruiting a line-up of 6 or 7 guys, each translating from one language to the next, something like Albanian - Macedonian - Bulgarian - Hungarian - Czech - Polish - Russian - English or something like that… And with so many people in the middle, they get to ask the assassin maybe two generic questions before the guy dies of his wounds.
Wish I remembered what the title of the movie was… but that scene has remained firmly lodged in my mind!
In that real long thread I started in MPSIMS, about the unnamed Narrator and Alice Terwilliger (a Londoner), there were two Scottish characters with heavy accents–but not incomprehensible.
I don’t know how to define it correctly but I’d say the Scots use more elision, a little different intonation and rhythm maybe too. The Manchester accent just totally changes vowels and reduces whole syllables to grunts. Now with this guy, even a fellow Mancunian says he’s ridiculous because he went to school and he should be able to speak better than that. I’ve heard other heavy English accents but the speakers seem to be able to speak more clearly when necessary. It’s not unique to the Brits though, there’s a lot of that Boston accent around here and I’ve met people who just can’t say things right if they have to. I know a guy who can’t manage to say ‘guard’ instead of ‘god’ or ‘bear’ instead of ‘beer’ even when he tries. And southerners who sound like they write with a ‘pin’ instead of a ‘pen’. I try to speak fairly clearly but when I say ‘on’ it sounds like ‘awn’ as anyone who grew up in the Balmer Merlin area would, yet I can still pronounce ‘dawn’ and ‘don’ differently. Even though a lot of this will throw me off at first I must be good at catching on because I get asked to translate a lot. And i consider it a better world where there’s variation. If everyone spoke like they were from Omaha life would be much duller.
[…]
Remember Barney Miller? Sgt. Yemana (Jack Soo) was from Omaha.
I think it was funnier on Jack Paar. 
Tell me more.
Serial translations are always interesting.
I grew up in Jakarta, and went to a church that was conducted in Chinese and Indonesian. Occasionally, we would have a guest speaker from Europe or the States. My dad, who would be translating the guest’s English into Chinese, would try to ask the speaker to trim his sermon a little, since a 20-minute sermon in English would probably become an hour-long jaunt once it was translated into two different languages.
He would always tell the guest speaker to skip the “traditional” joke at the beginning of the sermon. (Preachers often use jokes at the beginning of their sermons to establish rapport with the audience, set the general boundaries of the topic at hand, and to make the audience feel at ease.) The problem with jokes, though, is that they very seldom work across cultures. Anything involving word play is typically going to fall flat. Anything that relies on the audience having a shared cultural experience is also probably not going to work. (It might work a little better today, with the ubiquity of the internet, than it would have back in the 1970s.) However, my dad’s pleas always fell on deaf ears.
One Sunday, after reassuring my dad that he would skip the opening joke, the guest speaker started in with, “Hearing you sing reminds of the time …”. Now, with serial translation, the speaker generally speaks in short phrases, and then pauses to let the translations happen. My dad, frustrated with the guest speaker, translated the joke into Chinese this way, and which was dutifully repeated by the Chinese-to-Indonesian translator:
… I’m so sorry, but our guest is beginning a joke …
… He is now in the middle of the joke …
… He is almost done with the story …
… Please laugh politely so we can get started!
I heard the joke the English, and didn’t know Chinese well enough to catch what my dad said, but when I heard the Indonesian, I suddenly started giggling.
In a line spoken by the German- and Spanish-speaking drunk, there is a questionable usage. When translating the French police sergeant’s first question, asking Lucy where she got the money, he faces Ricky and says, “¿Dónde tomaste el dinero?” (“Where did you get the money?”) According to Google, the correct verb to use here is * sacar,* not * tomar. * Who’s right?
Google is wrong in this case. In Spanish, Tomar is used for “Take or Get”. Sacar is to “take out”. So in the way it was used in the episode, “Where did you get the money?” would be “Donde Tomaste el dinero”. On a side note, Tomaste is also used for the past tense of drink (drank). 