And further along the translation highway...
I was reading the list of ingredients on an English bottle of ketchup we
had bought in Spain (oh the profanity!) translating as I went along into
Spanish. I got to 'preservatives' and read it out as 'preservativos',
which is the official word for a 'rubber' (in the prophylactic sense) in
Spain.
They didn't want any on their chips.
I also heard of this one:
In a restaurant in Portugal they had Goose Barnacles on the menu.
In Spanish, and it appears in Portuguese also, they are called 'Percebes'.
Now, the proprietor wisely consulted a Portuguese to English dictionary
to offer these delicacies to a wider audience. Unfortunately (maybe it
was a concise dictionary) the other meaning for 'percebes' in
Portuguese is 'understanding', which he didn't. So they were offering
'understandings' on the menu.
It's a weird, wonderful world.
Cheers,
Luis.
Richmond Mathewson wrote:
On 18/02/2010 21:21, Lynn Fredricks wrote:
I similarly use acres, furlongs and guinees. I absolutely REFUSE to
work in metric weights and distances which remain completely
meaningless to me. I also use the word 'twelvemonth' from time to
time, as in "I haven't seen him in a twelvemonth".
I think that's just fine for normal communication, but this should be
food
for thought about servicing international markets. Even if the receiving
party knows what these things are, it communicates something else the the
receiver that you might use local vocabulary or colloquialisms for
official
communication.
Back before I became a souless business person, I taught some high
school.
There was a British story that referred to rubber boots as "rubbers"
repeatedly. That's not something you can trot out in a high school class
without expecting disruption ;-)
Hey-Ho, divided by a common language! I think you will find that
"rubbers" refers in that context to GALOSHES.
Of course, down in my school, where I teach Primary children, they use
rubbers all the time . . . but then, unlike standard Bulgarian school
practice, I insist that the children use pencils so that they can correct
their mistakes with rubbers rather than leave great, ugly, scrawlings-out
in their exercise books.
Possibly, some of us on the use-list are sufficiently old enough to
remember
an album by the Beatles called "Rubber Soul" - presumably that is what you
are referring to your having lost . . . :) It is available on CD:
http://www.amazon.com/Rubber-Soul-Remastered-Beatles/dp/B0025KVLT2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1266522000&sr=8-1
---------------------------------------------------------------------
And there, surely, lies the fundamental difference between British rubbers
and North American rubbers:
the former are used to correct mistakes,
the latter to prevent them.
What is, arguably the funniest thing of all is that the literal
translation of the
Bulgarian word for what North Americans call 'rubbers' is 'preservative'
. . .
and I always thought that was something you put in jam!
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