| דפים בנושא: < [1 2 3 4 5 6 7] > | Off topic: Your biggest language blunder in everyday life מפרסם התגובה: Melanie Meyer
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| While trying to speak Spanish | Apr 19, 2012 |
After spilling a glass of wine and wanting to say - "I'm so embarrassed!" and saying "I'm pregnant!" (embarrassada -spelling?) instead to the horrified looks of all the other patrons in the bar.
Or, in the same vein, saying "Je suis pleine" - literal translation of "I'm full" that's perfectly acceptable in Québec but means you've been knocked up in France.
Or a French guy saying "J'aime jouer avec mes gosses" in Québec... it means "I like playing with my children" in ... See more After spilling a glass of wine and wanting to say - "I'm so embarrassed!" and saying "I'm pregnant!" (embarrassada -spelling?) instead to the horrified looks of all the other patrons in the bar.
Or, in the same vein, saying "Je suis pleine" - literal translation of "I'm full" that's perfectly acceptable in Québec but means you've been knocked up in France.
Or a French guy saying "J'aime jouer avec mes gosses" in Québec... it means "I like playing with my children" in France and "I like playing with my testicles" in Québec ▲ Collapse
| | | | Lingua 5B 
בוסניה והרצגובינה
Local time: 13:07
חבר (2009)
מאנגלית לקרואטית
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phoeberuth wrote:
My (very short) German mother-in-law, whose English is somewhat limited, once said admiringly to a (very tall) English friend of mine "You are very gross!"
(German "gross" = "tall")
haha
| | | | Lingua 5B
בוסניה והרצגובינה
Local time: 13:07
חבר (2009)
מאנגלית לקרואטית
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| One of my students | Apr 19, 2012 |
.. one of my students, an anglophone, I asked him to conjugate the verb "to eat" in Serbian/ Present Tense, he goes:
ja jebem, ti jebeš, on jebe ... etc
actually:
ja jebem= I f*ck / I am f*cking
ja jedem = I eat/ I am eating
I couldn't possibly interrupt him until he finished conjugating the verb because he used all the correct forms, but for a wrong verb. And it sounded VERY funny.
[Edited at 2012-04-19 17:46 GMT]
| | | | Jesús Negro
ספרד
Local time: 13:07
מאנגלית לספרדית
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| F*** pints, please | Apr 19, 2012 |
When I was living in Scotland with my girlfriend, I did always the wrong hand signal to ask for TWO beers.
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| a friend of mine | Apr 19, 2012 |
told me the story of when he was teaching Arabic to some English wives whose husbands were posted to the middle east. he was only teaching a few basics so they could just do the niceties. But he had taught them how to say have you got any... ('andak) and covered a few essentials bread milk etc. He then said if you are shopping and don't know the word just say the English word.
one of the women later went to the haberdashery store to buy a zip not knowing the word she said 'andak z... See more told me the story of when he was teaching Arabic to some English wives whose husbands were posted to the middle east. he was only teaching a few basics so they could just do the niceties. But he had taught them how to say have you got any... ('andak) and covered a few essentials bread milk etc. He then said if you are shopping and don't know the word just say the English word.
one of the women later went to the haberdashery store to buy a zip not knowing the word she said 'andak zip.
She didn't realise until it was explained later that Zip sounds like the Arabic word for Penis. ▲ Collapse
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Hard to choose, I've made so many, but I think maybe the best was coming back from a holiday in Poland and enthusing (in Spanish) to my neighbour that the fields there had been full of white poppies. Only, instead of saying "amapolas" (poppies), I said "ama pollas" (c**k lovers). She was one of those typical ageing widows dressed in black that everyone associates with Spain, but she didn't flinch.
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Ty Kendall
הממלכה המאוחדת
Local time: 12:07
מעברית לאנגלית
| Another type of language blunder | Apr 20, 2012 |
A few years back when I was at Uni, a group of my friends (Greek Cypriots) were on a train in London.
Quite secure in the belief that nobody could understand them, one girl began to talk, at length, about the attractiveness of the guy sat opposite them...(she even went as far as discussing his suitability as "husband-material").
A few stops later, the guy stands up, thanks her in Greek for the compliments and gets off the train.
I don't think mort... See more A few years back when I was at Uni, a group of my friends (Greek Cypriots) were on a train in London.
Quite secure in the belief that nobody could understand them, one girl began to talk, at length, about the attractiveness of the guy sat opposite them...(she even went as far as discussing his suitability as "husband-material").
A few stops later, the guy stands up, thanks her in Greek for the compliments and gets off the train.
I don't think mortified quite covers it. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Henk Peelen
הולנד
Local time: 13:07
חבר (2003)
מגרמנית להולנדית
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SITE LOCALIZER | Could I bark, please? | Apr 20, 2012 |
Along time ago, people did'nt carry cell phnes with them. So, not stupid jingles that wake up the whole audience in a room listening to a speech, no fellow passengers in the subway loudly shouting all of their live secrets to the person at the other end of "the line" and ... now and then you asked people whether you were allowed to use their steady home / office telephone.
In Dutch the official word for call is telefoneren, but most common is bellen (due to the bells on the first telephone... See more Along time ago, people did'nt carry cell phnes with them. So, not stupid jingles that wake up the whole audience in a room listening to a speech, no fellow passengers in the subway loudly shouting all of their live secrets to the person at the other end of "the line" and ... now and then you asked people whether you were allowed to use their steady home / office telephone.
In Dutch the official word for call is telefoneren, but most common is bellen (due to the bells on the first telephones). Most verbs in Dutch and German are nearly similar, but bellen in German is bark (both dogs and mankind), snarl, bluster and so on.
I pointed to the telephone and not too smart, instead of "darf ich telefonieren?", I asked "darf ich bellen?", resulting in a smart answer "Sure enough, but could you do that outside please?" ▲ Collapse
| | | | | What is translation about anyway? | Apr 20, 2012 |
This wasn't my blunder, but I witnessed it as the supervisor of a young lady in charge of trainings where I worked. She spoke excellent English otherwise, and she also translated some of the training materials.
The Romanian term for translator is "traducator" and "a traduce" (tra-doo-chay) means "translate". I was shocked to see her wear the English name tag she translated and printed for herself: R C, Traducer.
| | | | Melanie Meyer
ארצות הברית
Local time: 07:07
חבר (2010)
מאנגלית לגרמנית
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TOPIC STARTER | Monolingual gaffe | Apr 20, 2012 |
When working in HR, a supervisor from the technical department frequently called to ask HR-related questions on behalf of his employees. Usually, the employee in question would be standing next to him while he was making the call. He would start most of his inquiries by saying: “Ich habe hier einen stehen”. Instead of the intended meaning of “someone’s standing next to me”, my female colleagues and I could hardly suppress our giggles because he was really saying: “I have an erection”.
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Leen Antwerpen (X)
הולנד
Local time: 13:07
מאנגלית להולנדית
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| Reason for laughter | Apr 23, 2012 |
Melanie Meyer wrote:
phoeberuth wrote:
"A fly can't bird, but a bird can fly"
was not quite so innocent in my literal German rendering. I had no idea why they were all rolling about on the floor laughing...
)) Good one!
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vögeln:
Das Verb vögeln ist eine umgangssprachliche und in der Regel als vulgärer Ausdruck empfundene Bezeichnung für die Ausübung des Geschlechtsverkehrs. Dabei bezeichnet es ebenso wie das Verb „ficken“ den penetrierenden Geschlechtsverkehr.
| | | | Jack Doughty
הממלכה המאוחדת
Local time: 12:07
מרוסית לאנגלית
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נזכור
When we were first married, my wife came out to join me in a private flat in Cologne. Our landlord and his wife were very friendly and invited us in for a coffee. In the course of the conversation, my wife wanted to tell them she had problems with one eye, on which she had recently had an operation. But she got the languages confused and said "Ich habe ein schlechtes Ei."
| | | | | Dialect. I take it you mixed Black Thai with White Thai;) | Apr 23, 2012 |
Melanie Meyer wrote:
A recent thread about funny translation mistakes inspired me to ask for your biggest language blunders in everyday life.
Here’s my contribution:
While learning Thai during my family’s Foreign Service assignment to Bangkok, my Thai teacher strongly encouraged us to practice our spoken Thai every single day right after learning a new topic in school with any local person we might be dealing with that day. The topic of the day was ‘flying kites at the annual kite festival’.
Diligent as I was, I went ahead and started a conversation with my cab driver on the way home from school. After some initial small talk, I proceeded to ask him (and I’ll try to transliterate the Thai script into English here): “Koor tot, na ka, khun koey chaak wow may ka?” What I wanted to say was “Excuse me Sir, have you ever flown a kite before?” However, the more common meaning of my question turned out to be: “Excuse me Sir, have you ever mast..bated before?”
Can you imagine the look on that taxi driver’s face?
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