Lost in translation

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Got any mis-translation stories?

About twenty years ago, my parents spent a year in Israel. My dad, especially, came home with a lot of wacky tales of linguistic misadventures.

His best, hands down, happened when he was at an Ultra-Orthodox wedding in Jerusalem. We’re talking about very religious Jews. Impeccably kosher.
So the waiter is coming around with chicken, and he asks my dad which piece he wants. Well, Dad is strictly a breast guy. He summons up his Hebrew skills, and remembers that “meat” is basar, and “white” is lavan. So he asks for some basar lavan.
The waiter gives him a very strange look.
Turns out, in Israel, basar lavan refers to pork… :smack:

I have another great, great story about Jews, pork, and translation mishaps, but I’ll let you have a turn while I try to remember the details.

2

Pork The Other White Meat

When I was a kid we went to Puerto Rico and drove around El Yunque. We came across a restaurant with the sign:

**…OPEN

…The Restaurant**

3

Years ago I was at a sushi restaurant with a Jewish friend. I noticed that the salmon nigiri used smoked salmon and mentioned it to my friend. He laughed and said, “Cool, Jewshi!”

The sushi chef overheard him and asked quizically, “Fourteen?”

(ju-shi is japanese for 14)

4

This is pretty minor, but years ago on E. 45th St. in Manhattan was a small restaurant run by Spanish speakers with a bilingual sign in the window:

SERVIMOS DESAYUNO
ALMUERZO Y CENA
WE SERVE BREAKFAST
LUNCH Y DINNER

5

I had been in Italy a couple of years and was leaving my new (to me, not brand new) car with the mechanic for a service. I wrote a note asking the mechanic to please check the hand brake. The word for brake in Italian is ‘frena’, I had never seen it written down before and wrote it as I heard it: ‘fregna’.

What a difference a letter makes.

When I went to colllect the car, there was a very red-faced mechanic who explained that ‘fregna’ is a roman slang word.

My note had asked him not to check the hand brake, but to check my vagina, by hand…

6

My current favorite is in my city’s one western restaurant.

They apparently serve “McFlour Coated Cock-Strings.”

7

I told my Japanese teacher that all my students were “ninshin.” She looked confused and asked “Even the men??” and I answered, “Yes! Especially the men.”

I’d mixed up “ninshin” PREGNANT and “nesshin” enthusiastic.

My friend did a worse one though, at a funeral she tried to catch what the people were murmuring to the family as they greeted them, and copied with “Gochisosama deshita.” Nobody reacted in any way at all but later at our Japanese lesson she asked WHY people would be saying “Thank you for the meal” at a funeral (after the ceremony, not the wake where there was a meal) and was told by our teacher that it wasn’t “Gochisosama deshita” but “Goshushosama deshita” (My condolences.)

8

JEWS, PORK, AND LANGUAGE MISHAPS, part II

This did not happen to a friend of a friend. This happened to the mother of a friend of my parents, when she was six years old. Still, it is one of the funniest stories I’ve ever overheard.

Dramatis personae:

THE NANNY, a German-speaking gentile who can’t stand the cook
THE COOK, a Hungarian-Yiddish-speaking Jew who can’t stand the nanny

So when the mother of the friend of the friend was six years old, her family moved to a new house. The cook decided that the first Shabbos spent in the new house should be special. What to do? Aha, she would put raisins in the challa. That would make a nice Shabbos treat.

Apparently, the nanny was in charge of the grocery shopping, so the cook goes to the nanny to ask her to buy some raisins.

“I need some roizhenkes (raisins)”, she says in Hungarian Yiddish.
“What?”, asks the nanny.
“Roizhenkes.”
“What?”
“Roizhenkes!”
“Ah, raw jenkes (raw pork).”

Now back then, raw pork couldn’t be sold within city limits, for health reasons. So the nanny hikes outside town, for an hour, in the sweltering sun. She buys her pork, and then walks back.

By the time the nanny gets back to the house, she’s absolutely exhausted. She puts the pork on the counter, then goes to take a nap.

In walks the cook. She unwraps the package on the ounter and starts screaming “Trief (nonkosher)! Trief!”

The nanny wakes up and stumbles into the kitchen to see what all the fuss is about.

“You brought in treif!”
“What are you yelling about? You asked me to.”

They get into a screaming match, and both women storm out of the house. They don’t come back that night.

MORAL OF THE STORY: if a devoutly religious Jew seems to ask you for pork, there’s probably something you’re missing.

9

My sister stayed at a B&B in Mexico. She went out one morning for a walk. One of the Spanish-speaking people at the B&B asked her what she was doing, and looked at her funny when she said “I’m walking for exercise”. She figured that walking for exercise just wasn’t a part of Mexican culture. Later, she figured out that she had actually said “I’m farting for exercise”.

10

In Poland, I went to buy bread. Luckily, such a task is easily accomplished by pointing and gesticulating, since I don’t speak a word of Polish. After I had communicated my wish to the saleswoman, she asked me in what I thought to be pretty accent-free German: “Jeden Tag?” (“Every day?”) while pointing at a loaf of bread. Somewhat puzzled by the strange conversation starter, but relieved at the knowledge that she spoke at least some bits of my native language, I just kind of let loose explaining that yes, I did eat bread most every day, that I liked the bread in Poland, that I liked Poland and vacationing here, etc. (a few days of being largely incommunicado can turn even taciturn old me into a babbler – plus she wasn’t entirely unattractive), when I recognized the universal ‘you can talk all you like, I still don’t understand a thing’-look that is common on and to all travellers to foreign countries on her face, so I shut my mouth more or less mid-sentence, pointed some more at the loafs of bread behind her and eventually we managed to complete the transaction to everyone’s satisfaction.

When I was back at the holiday home, I took out my dictionary, flipped through the pages and eventually figured out that ‘jeden’ means ‘one’, and ‘tag’ means ‘yes’. One, yes? :smack:

(I actually think I knew ‘tag’ at least, but in the context of such an apparently familiar German phrase, I didn’t even think it could mean anything else than what I took it to.)

11

We delivery

12

Living in Japan for 20 years, I’ve had more than my share of mistranslation stories.

One which happened early on was one of the more memorial ones. When I was a missionary, one of the new guys used to study interesting words, but they would slip out at the wrong times.

At the beginning of the new year, we were talking about New Year’s resolutions at church and everyone was asked to tell theirs. I said that I wanted to study more kanji. This guy said that he wanted to shit unko more. Everyone looked at him with big WTF expressions, until we figured out he had really wanted to say exercise undo more.

13

There’s tons of classic mis-translations in video games. “All your base are belong to us” anyone? But the one I wanted to share was from high school Spanish class (and one of my all-time favorite stories).

Senora L. was teaching us commands. She was using words we’d already knew and going around the class asking students, in Spanish, to do certain activities. It started normally enough, “raise your right hand”, “show me your pencil”, “switch seats with your neighbor”. Then she gets to my friend Matthew and tells him “Abra la puerta”: “Open the door”, simple enough! Matthew gets uncomfortable and repeats the command back to her “Abra la puerta? Really??” For reasons nobody could understand it was very clear he didn’t want to do it, but eventually relents and slowly gets out of his seat.

Matthew walks over to the door but after a long pause doesn’t open it. Instead he says to the door, “Hola la puerta. Como estas?” Senora L. is puzzled and dead silent. Matthew, expecting a “good job, go back to your seat” struggles to continue this literal one-sided conversation with the door. “Que tal…?” It finally sinks in to Senora L. as well as the rest of the class that he was thinking the command was “Habla la puerta” which he thought was “talk to the door”, hence the hesitation.

When she realized what was going on she let out the biggest laugh I had ever heard and haven’t heard since. I think that was the first time I saw someone literally roll on the floor laughing.

14

That anecdote is now committed to write-protected memory. Thank you.

15

and there is the famous example (urban legend?) of the computer program that translated English to Japanese:
the biblical quote “The spirit is strong, but the flesh is weak”
became “the wine was good, but the meat was spoiled”

16

There was a sign in a greasey hash place at Irving Park, Lincoln, and Damen that bragged that they had the best hat dogs in tawn.

Back in my Army days, a Special Forces guy told me a story of how he was traning some locals in Central America, pointed to a chicken running around and called it a pollo. Apparently, calling a chicken a pollo is like calling a live cow a steak.

17

I did read of one that supposedly happened to the writer: he was in some Spanish-speaking country (Mexico?), and was ordering breakfast on the phone. He had most of the words down, huevos and such, and also wanted to order ham. He knew the word sounded like “ham”, so he took a stab and asked for “ama”.

The confused voice came back, “Y ama?”

“Y ama, sí”, he replied. There was some confused consultation on the other end, and an English speaker came on the phone. The man explained in English what he wanted.

“Oh,” came the voice of understanding, “the word for ham is jamón. You ordered eggs and the housemaid.”

18

This reminds me of a story in a Tom Robbins book, I think it was “Still Life With Woodpecker”, where he was in Mexico, I think, and he was talking about how the children will surround you and pester you for candy. This particular group of kids was hitting him up for chicklets (the gum), and his response was “No habla chicklets”. He goes on to explain that he always thought “habla” meant “have” – “habla espanol” means “I have Spanish – I have knowledge of the Spanish language”. It was only later that he realized that he wasn’t telling the kids “I don’t have chicklets”, but rather “I don’t speak chicklets.”

19

In that case, what in blazes do they call a live chicken?

I spent a big whack of my childhood in Mexico and never heard a chicken, live or dead, called anything else…

20

My contribution is more of a mishearing than a mistranslation issue:

At one point while living in Mexico, we bought a puppy (a nice but dumb German Shepherd mix), that Mom eventually decided would be called Ajo (pronounced ahh-ho), which means “garlic”. While chatting (in English with occasional Spanish clarifications) with a semi-bilingual Mexican acquaintance, we mentioned our new baby. He gives us a look of extreme disbelief, and says, slowly “… Ajo? Really?”

He thought we had named the dog

Asshole