Toujours Tingo, by  Adam Jacot de Boinod is a collection of words and phrases from over 300 foreign languages for which there is no direct counterpart in English.

The “tingo” in the title is an Easter Island word, which means to borrow objects from a friend’s house one by one until there are none left.

Some of my favourite examples from Adam’s collection are the German ones: “Tantenverführer” - a young man with suspiciously good manners, literally, an aunt seducer; and “Trennungsagentur” - someone hired by a woman to tell her boyfriend he has been dumped. 

One word that may not have a British English equivalent is “Layogenic” - Filipino for someone good-looking from afar but ugly up close, but there is an American slang expression for this that is certainly used in California: “A full-on Monet” (as used by Alicia Silverstone’s character Cher in the film Clueless.)

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Those of you who watch Top Gear will be familiar with the section of the show which sees an anonymous chap in a white overall drag a range of cars around the test track in as fast a time as possible. Whilst doing so, he often has music (think Baroque) or language learning courses (Greek recently) playing in whatever high horse powered beast happens to be at his mercy that week.

The last few shows, however, have had the - now cult - figure listening to Morse Code. And yes, we have a translation of it…

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Even though it’s been a few years since I first had this emailed to me, it still makes me chuckle! For those of you that have ever travelled to Asia, you will certainly identify with it! It’s a transcript of a supposed telephone exchange between a guest and room service in an Asian hotel. Read it out loud for full effect. Whether true or not, it’ll certainly put a smile on your face!

Tenjewberrymuds for reading…..

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Yesterday, it was 60 years since the Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations’ General Assembly (that makes the year 1948, just in case you’re in the throws of a mid-week lull and can’t do the maths).

Clearly, that was as great a day for humanity as the day a certain snake tricked poor Eve into eating an apple wasn’t. But it was also the beginning of a long story for the translation industry. The Guiness Book of Records claims said document is the most translated text in the world - available at last count in 337 languages. (This sparked debate in the office as the Holy Bible, as commented on recently by me, is available in over 2000 languages: something must exclude it from the running - probably its confabulated nature.) Many of those languages are ones we, as a translation agency, have never even heard of - Huasteco, anyone? (spoken in Mexico) - and include even the synthetic language, Esperanto.

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Max Planck Institute Science journal mistakenly uses flyer for Macau brothel to illustrate report on China…

The respected research institute wanted beautiful and elegant Chinese classical texts to adorn its journal, which included a special report on China. Little did they know that the text they had chosen was from a saucy flyer promoting stirppers and other features of a brothel!

To Western eyes, Chinese characters look dramatic and beautiful, and have a powerful visual impact, but be careful that you know what they say before you print or publish whatever you are using them for!

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I was looking forward to the new BBC series with Kenneth Branagh playing a detective, Wallander. The trailers seemed good, so I made sure to plonk myself in front of the TV last night at precisely 9pm. The information button said that it was about a Swedish detective, so I assumed it was set in England with Branagh playing a Swedish person living in England. Swedish people generally have fantastic American and British accents (it seems they can choose which type they study at school), so the absence of a Swedish accent from Branagh didn’t strike me as odd. I did start to get really confused when after Branagh’s character was speaking about his father, some Swedish person died (a flag and a TV programme were the clues he was Swedish), so I assumed it was his father who died. It eventually dawned on me when the “Polis” showed up, that this was another horrible example of a show set in a foreign country where everyone speaks English!
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In this country, despite our multicultural make up, we have only one Official Language for our 60 or so million inhabitants. That language is, unless you’re from Barnsley, English. The minority languages recognized on these shores are Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Lowland Scots and Cornish and rather suprisingly do not include any Asian langugaes, despite a long history of immigrants from that area.

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I used to volunteer at Oxfam, back in the days when I had spare time. And at Oxfam, you meet all sorts of random characters: students, OAPs, antique hunters, book collectors, people on a budget and people trying to save things from the landfill. With all of these different personalities coming together for the Great Bargain Quest, you are bound to hear some rather interesting opinions… Once, while I was ringing up a man’s purchase, he commented: “why is it that Americans and Australians are the only ones who come to the UK, but never try to speak like the British?”

It seemed to me that he thought British English was superior to my American English, and that Americans/Australians should try a bit harder to assimilate. I really didn’t know what to say to that! I think I managed some random explanation about how people who come to the UK from non-English speaking countries use British English as their model, but I was a native English speaker, so why should I try to say tom-ah-to instead of tom-ay-to?

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Motorists in Swansea had to do a double take this week when a Welsh road sign told them: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated”.

Unaware of the real meaning, Council officials had the Welsh text printed on the road sign under the original English, which cautions: “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only.”

The blunder happened when the council emailed its in-house team for a translation, as all road signs in Wales have to be bilingual, only to receive a Welsh reply which they failed to realise was an automated out of office notification. They only became aware of their rather embarrassing mistake when Welsh-speakers pointed it out.

The moral of this tale; always get your translations checked by a native speaker….

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This post doesn’t strictly relate to translation, rather just words themselves in whatever beautiful language they may be - or not, as is in fact the case in this post - either way, do read on…

Reading is a multi cognitive process that has us decoding symbols in order to derive meaning. Once the retina recognises a set of symbols, the primary visual cortex processes them and then Wernicke’s area interprets them.

Convention has us arrange the symbols in a certain way and deviation from that pattern is discouraged. This is in order to maintain understandability across generations and to aid the formation of new words acording to the rules already in place.

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