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Lost in Translation Thirty Three

February 3, 2009
21:03 PM

You don’t have to go to a foreign country to be lost in translation.
Sile and I worked in a restaurant in Kent for two years in the seventies and we had quite a few problems of translation while there.

The most obvious one was the moment we asked in the village shop for a sliced pan, this was greeted with total hilarity ;- “He wants me to slice a frying pan!”
Others were more subtle, on Sunday to discuss meeting people on the following Thursday it was disastrous to propose “Next Thursday” as the designated rendezvous.
That would involve one hanging about for a week.
The correct term for that day was “This Thursday” and they called “Next Thursday” what we called “Thursday Week”

Some Irish friends lost a good bottle of wine in this way, opening it a week early for guests who never arrived.

Other differences were less likely to lead to disaster.

For “Bold” , as in a bold child, they used “naughtybold to them meant brave.
We also had a problem with bring and take, to us fairly well interchangeable whereas to them to bring something away with you was a contradiction in terms.

Sick, which to us is unwell, to them was vomiting, instead they used ill, a word alien to us except in compounds like ill-will.
But strangely it was the restraints of their language that we found most bizarre.
Kitchens in Ireland were not places of clean language, here they were (in this restaurant anyway) far more careful.
I had to bite my tongue on many occasions after seeing the shock on faces when I effed and blinded having cut my finger or dropped something.

This was brought home to me dramatically when the head chef in the restaurant in which we worked spilled a pot of boiling water on his lap.
Oh Fuck! He said- and then immediately (and while still obviously suffering) he apologised for his language.

Comments

  1. Peter Denman

    on February 3, 2009

    And then there was “couple” – for us signifying a vague handful, anything from three to six or seven, but over there strictly two.

  2. justin

    on February 4, 2009

    Peter: if a recipe suggests cooking a cake in the oven for a couple of hours, would you check your oven seven hours later? 🙂

  3. Martin

    on February 4, 2009

    Ah but we would never use the imprecise “couple” in relation to cooking times! Where the problem did arise was the possibilities of “a married couple” etc.

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  Martin Dwyer
Consultant Chef