Times when things got lost in translation on holiday while and chaos ensued. Photo / Getty Images
Times when things got lost in translation on holiday while and chaos ensued. Photo / Getty Images
Trying to understand something poorly translated or desperately attempting to fathom the appropriate etiquette is all part of travel. These are a few of our favourite “lost in translation” hiccups.
I don’t speak Kiwi
You’d think translation errors occur solely when two different languages are in play, but you’d be wrong. I’ve had my fair share of shockers in New Zealand.
Coming from the UK, I should be accustomed to deciphering a dialect but not long after arriving in NZ, I was at a complete loss while listening to a Kiwi.
Granted, I was sitting in a busy bar with a loud group, but when my friend told us she’d applied for a new job, I was all ears.
From what I could work out, she wanted to work with avocados, which I thought was odd, coming from a successful museum curator. Still, she thought the change would be good and avocados weren’t all that bad. This went on for a good five minutes while she passionately spoke about the pros and cons of avocados and how different life would be if she gave everything up for avocados.
Only months later, when the role fell though, did I realise she hadn’t been saying avocados at all. The job was in Invercargill.
The same girl later wanted to buy a house in “the wop-wops”. Took me another few years to realise the wop-wops isn’t an actual place.
In a similar vein, when my good friend from the UK visited NZ, she enjoyed a whirlwind adventure across both islands as part of a Kiwi Experience bus tour. When she arrived back in Auckland, she was full of stories from the trip. Most memorable was an interaction she had with a Kiwi man about his magnificent mohawk. They had an entire conversation about his hair, with my friend thinking he was telling her that he’d had it for six years. While not really caring how long he’d had a hairstyle, she tried to move the conversation in another direction, but he was insistent on telling her “six years”.
He wasn’t. He was insistent on telling her it was “sexy as”.
Hats off
My parents have lived in France for almost 20 years and while they’ve both made an effort to learn the language, things still go awry.
Not long ago, my mum told me the pair of them, along with a group of English friends, attended a charity event. One woman in the bunch said she’d read the flyer (in French) and everyone was required to wear a hat. As she was the most fluent French speaker, no one questioned this detail and, on the night, donned the appropriate attire. My mother, for reasons known only to herself, decided a non la would be most fitting: the conical-shaped headwear typical to Vietnam.
So, there they sat, a group of eight elderly English folk in a room of bemused French patrons - notably hatless - while the English contingent wore fedoras and newsboy caps, and even a feathered cavalier.
Only later, as the event came to an end, a hat appeared - passed around the room for gold coin donations.
Yes, a hat. For the money. As explained on the flyer.
A Vietnamese lady wearing a non la. Photo / v2osk on Unsplash
Make it up as you go along
Just because you want a word to mean something doesn’t mean it does. Even when you shout “bacon!” at a French supermarket worker in a French accent, like my dad.
In 2010, my brother lived in Amsterdam so I flew across from the UK with five friends for a visit.
When we arrived, we decided it’d be easy to catch the train into the city centre, except the train station was large and the departures were frequent, so we had no idea which one to catch.
My friend (who is fluent in three languages) saw the “snell” train and, using unfound wisdom we all too willingly accepted, said that snell sounded like snail, which are slow, so we should avoid any train that had “snell” on it.
Fluent in three languages and this was her logic.
We blindly followed and we arrived very late. The train took an age. And that’s because snell is Dutch for “fast”.
A tram leaving Amsterdam Central Train Station. Photo / 123RF
But wait, there’s more...
At this point, translation blunders became a hot topic amongst the wider lifestyle team.
These are their stories.
An unspeakable act
I was staying at a great budget hotel in a Francophone city. The staff were lovely and very patient with my schoolgirl French; I knew enough to book a room, pay to use the shared showers, and exchange other niceties. I can also book train tickets and order at restaurants, but that’s about it. However, my vocabulary was tested when, on using the bathroom one day, I found human excrement on the floor. Thinking the best thing to do was to notify the staff that someone had had an accident, I went downstairs to the front desk to try to explain, with my limited grasp of the language, what had happened. From the look on their faces, I’m certain what they inferred from my garbled Gallic - and my taking them to the bathroom to point out the situation - was that it was me who had done the (quite literally) unspeakable act. If it was a test of my grasp of the French language (a complete fail) then it was also a test of their customer service, which was genial and respectful; despite the language barrier, and this odd Kiwi woman pointing at a pile on the floor.
In 2016, I was enjoying my December break over in the UK when I was invited to a Christmas party by one of my English-born pals. With no festive clothes to wear, I asked if I could go rummaging in her wardrobe for something that screams “tis the season”. With no luck, I asked if she had anything that really reflected the Christmas cheer - a pair of red pants, perhaps? She seemed really taken aback by my request, which I guess I understood - red jeans are so 2010. But when she emerged from her cupboard with a red lacy g-string I’d promptly realised we had a translation error. We laughed over the misunderstanding - but I wore the festive undies anyway.
- Megan Watts, Lifestyle Multimedia Journalist
Red pants required for a festive party. Photo / krakenimages on Unsplash
It makes no cents
Barcelona’s La Boqueria market was mind-blowing. The vegetables! The seafood! The extraordinarily cheap goat cheese! We bought coffees and sat down on stools. A busker smiled and played and we clapped and he played some more and then the time came to give him some money. We’d been in Europe less than a day, but had amassed some coins which we duly handed over. The busker’s demeanor changed. Whatever he yelled at us, just before he spat on the ground, was definitely not something we’d learned in a term of community education classes at Mt Roskill Grammar. Perhaps he hated us. Or, perhaps, we realised later that day, we’d paid him approximately four cents for his time.
- Kim Knight, Journalist
The busker’s demeanor changed. Photo / Brian Kndeneh on Unsplash
Got a light?
Love led me to live in Mobile, Alabama in the US for a short term, and late one night, my cheap car was making funny noises. This was long before smartphones, so I needed a torch to look under the car.
I found the nearest 7-Eleven and walked inside, looking for a torch, fruitlessly.
The friendly guy behind the counter looked at me, confused but, hearing my foreign accent, keen to help.
I repeated, clearer and slower, “a torch”, thinking it could be a language thing; but then after more vacant stares, I broke it down as best I could: “You know, you hold it, light comes out... for the dark...” My brain didn’t know how to better explain it.
Then it clicked with him.
“Oh, you mean a flashlight!?”
“Yes!!” It hit me immediately. Ah, yes, of course, in America, a torch is called a flashlight; it was so obvious in hindsight.
