Lost in translation

Photo Credit: Takako Tominaga

Mastering foreign languages is, needless to say, no easy task. Thanks to Google Translator and dictionaries that handily fit in your iPhone, it’s a little easier to bumble through. But there are always times when pulling out a dictionary, digital or otherwise, is just not feasible—and of course, those are inevitably the times you make your most embarrassing mistakes.

Take the word embarrassed, for example. A foreign student struggling to converse in rudimentary Spanish might declare, to cover his tracks, “Estoy embarazada.” Unbeknownst to him, he just declared that he was pregnant.

John F. Kennedy famously made a similar faux pas in 1963 (or did he?) during a visit to Berlin, when in a speech he said, “Ich bin ein Berliner”—which can be translated as “I am a jelly doughnut.”

Some of my former classmates are teaching English to schoolchildren in rural China, and they encounter so many hilarious misuses of English that they’ve dedicated a section of their blog to them. Some of my favorites come from a student whose name, when fed through Google Translator, comes out as “Steamed Double Mermaid.” In one note, she says, “Today, I was the Internet.”

And let’s not forget the ultimate collection of wayward words: Engrish.com. The site features strange approximations of English from all over the world. Every day you think you’ve seen the best one…and then the next day rolls around.

Hilarity aside, it is entirely understandable that people misuse languages that aren’t native to them. Humans have a sense of humour (most of us, anyway) for a reason. What really takes the cake is misunderstanding your own language. In London, confusions of this sort occur perilously often between British and American English (although some would contend that whatever they speak across the pond, it certainly ain’t English). What’s peculiar about this divide is the types of words whose meanings Americans and Brits disagree on. This goes beyond the simple aubergine/eggplant and courgette/zucchini conundrum. Herein lies the rub:

a British waistcoat = an American vest

a British vest = an American undershirt (or wife beater, as moronic as that term is)

British trousers = American pants

British pants = American underpants

In effect, American words for outerwear are British words for underwear.

One can’t help but wonder what this says about Britain’s opinion of Americans.