[Multilingual Monday] Connotations, Plus: Engrish in Reverse!

[aadroma]

Man, thank God for sites like JeKai!! Japanese can be considered by many to be vague -- あいまい, aimai. Toss in the fact that, like any other language, there are words that garner other connotative meanings outside of their book definitions (some of which may be used far more frequently than what the dictionary says the word means!), and it just gets

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[progbear]

Well, I’ve already gone on about why you say “me gusta” and not “yo gusto” (like was a common era in my high school Spanish classes). And there’s of course the obvious hurdles of pronunciation-“manejar” (to drive) not “manajar” (to fuck), “perro” (dog) not “pedo” (fart), etc.

There’s also documentation of novice French speakers mistakenly saying “Je suis complète” to mean “I’m full,” when it actually means “I’m pregnant.”

Funniest mistaken translation I’ve ever seen by an English speaker. The band Italian band Banco del Mutuo Soccorso has an album entitled Io Sono Nato Libero (I Am Born Free). They translated it as It’s Me, a Free Actor. I didn’t think I’d ever stop laughing!

Misguided non-English singing by English-speaking singers: “¿Come Again? Toucan” (in Spanish) by Grace Slick*, “C’était toi” by Billy Joel and “Sing Sing” (likewise in mangled high-school French) by Eurythmics. Back in the 70’s, Canadian folk singer Bruce Cockburn had (more or less) one French-language tune per album; the lyrics weren’t bad exactly, but his French accent remains strange to my ears.

*reportedly Grace wrote the lyrics with the aid of the Mexican studio janitor, with the two of them getting really drunk and him translating her English lyrics to Spanish, which she wrote down phonetically. I can definitely believe it, particularly considering it’s Grace Slick!

[akakuma]

Cockburn...I lolled...