Anyone else spot a trend there?... ;P
Cheers,
Luis.
On 19 Feb 2010, at 17:01, Andre Garzia wrote:
the portuguese word for being ashamed is the spanish word for being
pregnant...
also, funny differences from portugal portuguese to brazil portuguese:
portugal bicha means a queue of people, in brazil it means gay in the
queer sense.
portugal cueca means the girls or boys underwear while in brazil it
means only boys.
portugal durex means condoms while in brazil it is that sticky tape
you use to glue stuff to notebooks.
portugal pica means to get an injection (shot) for medicina, in brazil
is the slang for the mens private parts when it is happy and proud.
portugal propinas means tax while in brazil it means bribe.
portugal tesão means point while in brazil it means being horny.
portugal cacete which is a short bagette bread, in brazil means male
private parts as well, it is also a popular interjection used whenever
you need to scream something, I use it when someone tries to hit my
car when they shouldn't.
but my all time favorite is the portuguese expression that they use
when a woman is on her period, they use "estar com historias" which
literally means "having stories"?!?!
On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 8:54 PM, Luis <[email protected]> wrote:
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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