Thread: the love of language

Originally Posted by nzFuzzy

We had a growing South African community who thought this was just great.
In Afrikaans "Ek het 'n hoender" (which is apparently very similar in pronunciation) means "I've got a chicken"

Then again...
the Afrikaans word for traffic light(signal) translates into English as "Robot".
So just drive down the road and take a left at the 3rd robot.

You know, the chicken thing could be west Flemish as well. Supposedly, what they speak is Dutch
Btw, the Afrikaans for submarine is kaniezienieboot which literally translate to 'cannot see no boat'

Reading instruction manuals or ebay ads translated from Chinese is always entertaining.

Another place whose name doesn't do so well in translation is a little village in Austria.
The main crime there tends to be tourists stealing the road signs...
Fucking, Austria - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

With a first name like Creighton, you can imagine it gets botched badly and is the butt of many jokes (like people calling me crayola, creaton, and, yes, crouton).

When I was a teenager, two of my friends ended up going to stay with one of their aunts and uncles in Florida. I was supposed to go, but the friend who was related to the aunt and uncle ended up having to tell me I couldn't go because his parents thought it would be imposing and just too many people. Well, the first thing out of his aunt's mouth when they got there was "Why didn't you bring more of your friends down?" and, to make matters worse, their address was on Creighton Ave, across from Creighton First Methodist Church, and down the corner from the Creighton Ave. Diner.

They both felt so terrible they cut the trip short by two days just to come back and hang out with me.

Oh, and apparently, I have a partial scholarship to Creighton University in Nebraska, or so I'm told...

Originally Posted by crouton976

With a first name like Creighton, you can imagine it gets botched badly and is the butt of many jokes (like people calling me crayola, creaton, and, yes, crouton).

When I was a teenager, two of my friends ended up going to stay with one of their aunts and uncles in Florida. I was supposed to go, but the friend who was related to the aunt and uncle ended up having to tell me I couldn't go because his parents thought it would be imposing and just too many people. Well, the first thing out of his aunt's mouth when they got there was "Why didn't you bring more of your friends down?" and, to make matters worse, their address was on Creighton Ave, across from Creighton First Methodist Church, and down the corner from the Creighton Ave. Diner.

They both felt so terrible they cut the trip short by two days just to come back and hang out with me.

Oh, and apparently, I have a partial scholarship to Creighton University in Nebraska, or so I'm told...

That's classic!

I wonder which words or phrases in English get lost in translation or appear strange in another language. Heck maybe even into British english. One of the hardest things when learning Portuguese was not using American idioms, well, translating them into Portuguese. You could not say, for example, 'poor baby' or 'what's up'. You did have other Brazilian idioms but they were hardly ever a direct translation. To this day I still have problems understanding Brazilian slang or idioms. Do non-native English speakers get confused with our idioms?

Going back to Ireland, there is a village in County Donegal that has a very successful diving club! You can find on the web and it is really called the Muff Diving Club...

Quite a few Americanisms are a bitty iffy in English English of course, such as the Fanny Pack and of course, we have stuff that can cause consternation over there such as one of my favourite meals, Faggots & Peas followed by Spotted Dick!

Gareth

Originally Posted by Mephisto

Do non-native English speakers get confused with our idioms?

I think English is just plain confusing .

A friend of mine who worked for Sony showed me a congratulatory email from Tokyo. It read something like "Congratulations on your progress this year. We, in Tokyo have also been hardly working."