One
of the greatest challenges for expatriates is learning to communicate in their
host country. Even a common language is
no guarantee of easy communication. I
worked for an American company for a while and had to take great care with
English colloquialisms, use an American spellcheck and watch out for dates as American dates are written back to front
compared with British ones. Habits of
your home country also stay with you no matter how accultured you become to
your host society. I can still amuse my
English husband with the odd, inadvertence use of Dutch time conventions – 10 minutes
before the half hour and so on.
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The
real confusion arises, however, when you bring a foreign language into the
mix. Homophones (words that sound
similar but mean different things) can be a nightmare, for example Pollo
(chicken) and Polvo (powder) in Spanish, massage/message in English or Gäste/Geste in German. Even worse than homophones, however, are the
false friends. The Russian word for snow,
снег, sounds very like snake but you will not get much снег in Sub Saharan
Africa. Интеллигентный sounds like intelligent but means cultured and if
someone asks for your Фамилия they are asking for your surname not the health of
your family.. You might think the Spanish word embrazada means
embarrassed but use that word and you will be implying that someone is
pregnant which will probably embarrass you
in turn. If you hear the words trap and
tuin in Dutch someone is talking about a stair and a garden. If a Swede mentions the word bra in
conversation he is not (necessarily) referring to an undergarment but saying
something is good. There are literally
thousands of false friends just waiting to trip the unwary.
Grammar
can be very confusing. Russian is a
fertile language for grammatical nightmares – mostly concerned with adjectives
and nouns – the adjective must conform with the gender and case of the noun. Counting gets particularly difficult so you
use a different expression to say one year, two-four years and 5+ years, then repeat for 21, 22-4 etc. English, however, must be truly terrible for
people to learn particularly the vast number of
homophones, the huge number of synonyms, homonyms a-plenty (eg rose/rose
as in flower and get up) and our large number of different tenses used in
subtly different ways.
Modern
technology can be a lifesaver but Google translate, babelfish and other similar
programs are not immune to mistakes. A
former colleague of ours has a young baby and posts photographs of her to an
album on Facebook. Some months ago I
commented on one of the photographs which means that I see when new people comment on the album. Most of the comments are along the lines of ‘just
like her daddy’ or ‘what a beautiful girl’.
I was very surprised therefore to see an email message telling me that
someone had posted the comment ‘Whore, good health baby.’ On the album. When I looked up the original text I saw that the poster had actually written ‘Cutie’ not ‘Whore’
but the auto translate had got it very very badly wrong.
Facebook Translation Fail |
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