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Lost in Translation Eight

May 5, 2006
11:00 AM

One is particularly inclined to get lost in translation when travelling between two different languages, an obvious thought I know but if you skim back through my other six “Lost in Translations” you will see that most of them are about people who claim to speak the same language misunderstanding each other.
A school friend of mine was half German and had an aunt to stay who spoke absolutely no English.
She was left alone in the house in Cork one morning when the breadman called looking for his daily order (this was the sixties when such calls were normal).
Terrified of having to try and communicate in an unknown language the aunt produced one of her few English words. She knew that “Morgan” in German meant tomorrow which was the day she wanted him to return.
Unfortunately “Morgan” also translates as “Morning” which was the word she delivered to the breadman. To which he politely replied “Morning! And what bread would you like today?” This apparently went on for some time. The breadman thinking he was up against some arcane German greeting ritual and the aunt getting hysterical.

Another traditional minefield was the Irish Au Pair having her first trip abroad with her careful lexicon of convent filtered French.
The classic, and maybe apocryphal, story is of the Au Pair having dined extremely well, and, being pressed to have some more, declared herself full.
She gave “Je suis plein” as her reason for stopping.
She couldn’t for the life of her understand the consternation that then ensued.
How was she to know that “Plein” is the vulgar French for pregnant.
Feebly trying to rescue an obviously now hysterical pere et mere she decided to elucidate her state of satiation by explaining that she was in fact, finished.
She said “Je suis terminé”
This only caused the mounting hysterics to redouble in volume.
The family, wondering how they were going to survive the first blow had now been reliably informed that their Au Pair was not only pregnant but also dying!
Terminé in French meaning finished in the literal sense.

I never did hear how the situation finally resolved itself.

My own lost in translation experience in Italy was not resolved finally until we returned from our holidays.

We had rented a gorgeous villa in beautiful Tuscany and, unusually for us who were more used to cool French welcomes, were visited on the first night by our landlord. The villa had been booked through an agency and until he met us he had assumed us to be English.
When he discovered us Irish his eyes glazed over and he said;(he had not one word of English and us not much more Italian)
“Ah ! Irlanda! and then something that sounded like “Aw key!”
At our obvious lack of understanding he then, and he was small and fat, proceeded to dance around the room flapping his wings, stopping occasionally to level an imaginary rifle at the heavens and say bang! bang!, followed by a fairly good imitation of the dying swan.
This went on until we all collapsed in laughter, bonded by mutual lack of communication.
We never did find out what he was trying to tell us during the time we stayed there, but we became great friends
When we got back to Ireland we eventually worked out that the man was a huntsman and had a burning ambition to get to Ireland, one of the few places where wild geese;”Oche” could be legally shot.

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  Martin Dwyer
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