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English as She Is Spoke (1884) [pdf]

165 points| lelf | 3 years ago |exclassics.com

136 comments

order

asveikau|3 years ago

I think this highlights some differences between now and the 19th century.

Global communication and travel, to say nothing of media consumption, is much easier today. Many more Portuguese or Brazilian people have easy access to English. But back then, someone who didn't even speak English could publish this phrase book and appear credible.

bonzini|3 years ago

There are still plenty of topics in which one can "appear credible"—and given chatGPT's skill in bullshitting about various topics, it's easier than ever.

DanBC|3 years ago

There are a million YouTube videos of people confidently telling you how to do something but getting it pretty badly wrong.

There are so many that there's now another genre of reacting to this bad advice.

WalterBright|3 years ago

One of my Iranian colleagues back when I worked in an office had many entertaining phrases, like:

"I go make some shoppings"

"Time for go"

Naturally, the rest of the gang picked them up and used them. I still say them to the consternation of others.

agentwiggles|3 years ago

In a similar vein, "do the needful" has become so entrenched in some of my friends' vernacular that it's now used almost completely unironically.

Also, "like such as," from the old "Miss Teen USA" viral video, has stuck in my craw to the point that its use is unconscious (though still intended humorously).

xdennis|3 years ago

> One of my Iranian colleagues back when I worked in an office had many entertaining phrases, like:

> "I go make some shoppings"

As a Romanian living in the London, I hear English mistakes from various nationalities and I'm surprised how similar some are to Romanian, even when there's no connection. In this case, in Romanian we also word-for-word say "to make shoppings".

It often feels like English is the odd man out. :)

As an example, a Lithuanian was showing me a shortcut. He said "press alt plus ii". So I press "Alt+I". He chuckled and said "No, alt plus the English ii". So I pressed "Alt+E". The great vowel shift left vowels unrecognizable to other languages (/iː/ became /aɪ/, /eː/ became /iː/, ...).

WalterBright|3 years ago

The American GIs after the war loved to mangle Japanese:

Japanese person "Ohio gazimus!"

GI: "Well, Kentucky gazimus to you, too!"

or:

GI: "No toucha my mustache!"

Things went the other way, too. My dad would collect Japanese flyers aimed at GIs with horribly mangled English.

dls2016|3 years ago

Not in the same vein as the link, but I had an Iranian colleague tell me his wife was working occasionally as a babysitter, in technical violation of her visa... but he couldn't think of how to say this in English. He moved his finger back and forth under his nose and said in Iran he'd say she's working "under the mustache". I thought this was hilarious and told him how we'd say she's working "under the table".

I have never independently confirmed if this was an actual saying in Iran or not. (Google is not helpful.)

DrBazza|3 years ago

For whatever reason “learnings” is being used instead of lessons.

wardedVibe|3 years ago

Heaven forbid I disagree with Mark Twain, but star war: backstroke of the west[0] is another great example in this uh genre.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170115091456/http://winterson....

spijdar|3 years ago

Since you mentioned it, I have to bring up the fact that fans of this, er, masterpiece made a (shockingly?) high quality audio dub over the entirety of the original with the dumped subtitles: https://youtu.be/XziLNeFm1ok

This might legitimately be one of my favorite pieces of entertainment in existence, if only because of the delivery and emotion behind nonsense idiom mistranslations. It's glorious.

agentwiggles|3 years ago

I find that grammar perversions like this have a direct line to my funny bone in a way that almost nothing else does. Must have something to do with the subversion of expectation with something so incredibly basic as language.

Even after seeing it many times, this old classic still makes me laugh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EShUeudtaFg

DiggyJohnson|3 years ago

From the Wikipedia:

> O novo guia da conversação em portuguez e inglez, commonly known by the name English as She Is Spoke, is a 19th-century book written by Pedro Carolino, with some editions crediting José da Fonseca as a co-author. It was intended as a Portuguese–English conversational guide or phrase book. However, because the "English" translations provided are usually inaccurate or unidiomatic, it is regarded as a classic source of unintentional humour in translation.

> The humour largely arises from Carolino's indiscriminate use of literal translation, which has led to many idiomatic expressions being translated ineptly. For example, Carolino translates the Portuguese phrase chover a cântaros as "raining in jars", when an analogous English idiom is available in the form of "raining buckets".

> It is widely believed that Carolino could not speak English and that a French–English dictionary was used to translate an earlier Portuguese–French phrase book, …

kwhitefoot|3 years ago

> "raining buckets"

Really? Which part of the UK does that come from. Where I come from *Nort Wilts.) the related phrase would be "It's bucketing down!" but I've never heard anyone say "It's raining buckets!".

WalterBright|3 years ago

My favorite mistranslation came from the first time the Olympics were in China. One of the food vendors hung up a banner "401 Not Found".

dkdbejwi383|3 years ago

I’d be interested in a source for this if you have one

dang|3 years ago

The Idiotisms and Proverbs section is one of the more hilarious and I wonder how many of them can be mapped back to originals. The only one I could trace is A horse baared don't look him the tooth, which presumably maps back to Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Probably quite a few of them are no longer common in English either by now, which makes computing the inverse harder.

kgeist|3 years ago

I could decode these, because there are equivalents in my native Russian:

>"With tongue one go to Roma"

= you can achieve anything with good communication skills

>"It want to beat the iron during it is hot"

= seize the opportunity while you can

>"to come back to their muttons"

you say "let's go back to our sheep" when you realize you digressed

msrenee|3 years ago

Happy to see the classic American phrase, to craunch the marmoset. Makes me crave apple pie and LSD.

frozenlettuce|3 years ago

>horse baared don't look him the tooth => "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth"

The original Portuguese expression would be "A cavalo dado não se olha os dentes"

dang|3 years ago

A cartoon I saw years ago shows two men sitting at a table in a café. There's a book or two on the table. One says to the other: "Why you be not happy with me as translator of books by you?"

PinkMilkshake|3 years ago

I am reading a book on fuzzy logic that was translated from Japanese. The translation is quite bad and difficult to read. At one point it was talking about calculus and mentioned Newton and "Ripunitz". It took me a minute to work out what I was reading:

Leibniz -> ライプニッツ (ripunittsu) -> Ripunitz

chris_wot|3 years ago

I first read about this in Stephen Pile's The Book of Heroic Failures. He seemed particular taken with the phrase "To craunch a mamoset".

IncRnd|3 years ago

> it has been reserved to our own time for a soi-disant instructor to perpetrate—at his own expense—the monstrous joke of publishing a Guide to Conversation in a language of which it is only too evident that every word is utterly strange to him.

Times aren't that different!

Turing_Machine|3 years ago

Definitely a classic.

Some friends and I used to use "spits in the coat" to express the superiority of one thing over another, e.g.

"Framework 1 spits in the coat of Framework 2". "Sports Team 1 spits in the coat of Sports Team 2."

sogen|3 years ago

Galactic Pot Healer by Philip K. Dick has some examples of this too

akolbe|3 years ago

What's remarkable is how good machine translation (DeepL, Google Translate) has become at handling idiomatic expressions in recent years. Still not perfect, of course (there's still the odd clanger), but anyone trying to do the same task today would fare considerably better.

gherkinnn|3 years ago

I disagree. I can't speak for Deepl, but Google remains terrible at idioms. Give the phrase "There's mud all over the shop." a try.

cja|3 years ago

This book is featured in The Book of Heroic Failures, which has made me cry with laughter since I was a child. Delighted to discover that it's real

dwighttk|3 years ago

My postilion has been struck by lightning

chadlavi|3 years ago

Feed this into ChatGPT