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English as She Is Spoke (1884) [pdf]
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- ZeroGravitas 4y agoOn Standard Ebooks with an appropriate cover image: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/pedro-carolino_jose-da-fonseca/english-as-she-is-spoke https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/pedro-carolino_jose-da-fon...
- DiggyJohnson 4y agoFrom 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 4y 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!".
- humanistbot 4y agoIt's more "buckets of rain"
- adelie 4y agoit's a common expression here in the US, at least! unsure about the UK.
- eru 4y agoIt would be exceedingly funny, if the expression had become idiomatic in the US, _because_ of the book. (However, it might have come to US English from Spanish which is pretty close to Portuguese and thus ultimately from the same source as the book?)
- anthk 4y agoSpanish has "llover a cántaros" too.
- nickcox 4y agoAlso from north Wilts and I'm pretty sure I've heard (and used) both forms.
- andrew_ 4y ago"raining cats and dogs" also popular in the U.S.
- denton-scratch 4y agoI just stepped on a poodle.
- parrellel 4y agoRaining Buckets is definitely still in use in America, and shows up enough in old books? Linguistic drift?
- jasonhansel 4y agoWhere I am (Boston area) "raining cats and dogs" seems to be the more common idiom.
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- simonh 4y agoAllegedly this inspired the Monty Python sketch about the Hungarian-English phrase book.
- akolbe 4y agoWhat'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 4y agoI 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.
- Aardwolf 4y agoWhat if you actually want to literally translate "There's mud all over the shop"?
- gherkinnn 4y agoAnd this is where I found translation services to fall apart. I worry a lot of language getting will be lost in an effort to reduce it to something a machine can handle.
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- denton-scratch 4y agoI think in that context, it's already literal. "All over the shop" as an idiom means disorganized, chaotic. I don't use it to mean "all over the place" in the sense of something pervading some location.
- Tade0 4y agoGoogle search can't seem to find this phrase. What does it mean?
- wardedVibe 4y agoHeaven 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.com/2009/01/episode-iii-backstroke-of-west-redux.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170115091456/http://winterson....
- spijdar 4y agoSince 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 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 4y agoI 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EShUeudtaFg
- wardedVibe 4y agoMy partner and I have a difficult time saying pregnant without using one of those variations. Definitely one of my favorite bits of nonsense.
- jonstaab 4y agoIn the same vein, but for LoTR: https://www.angelfire.com/rings/ttt-subtitles/ https://www.angelfire.com/rings/ttt-subtitles/
- angry_moose 4y agoOmnibus Podcast (Ken Jennings and John Roderick) did a good episode about it as well: https://www.omnibusproject.com/340 https://www.omnibusproject.com/340
- asveikau 4y agoI 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 4y agoThere 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.
- marc_abonce 4y agoThis kind of thing still happens today. For example this reminded me of the Scots Wikipedia story, which took many years before being discovered: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24273851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24273851
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- DanBC 4y agoThere 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.
- asveikau 4y agoI'm not sure how my comment was interpreted as "it's impossible to be wrong". I made a narrow claim that faking English knowledge in Brazil and Portugal is harder today than in the 19th century.
- DanBC 4y agoBut it isn't, which is why there are so many people on YouTube earning money telling you how to do things the wrong way.
- WalterBright 4y agoOne 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 4y agoIn 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).
- pxeger1 4y agoThese are a class of mistake mainly made by native English speakers, but I've ended up using words like "irregardless" and "misunderestimated" unironically because I used them ironically for so long that I forgot
- raffraffraff 4y agoIsn't that pretty much how the Americanism "I could care less" originated?
- nerdponx 4y agoYes. Along similar lines, expect a spelling convergence of "wary" and "weary" in the next 5-10 years due to so many people not knowing the difference between the two, not bothering to check, and perpetuating confusion by using the wrong one in their own writing.
- sauruk 4y agoThat one frustrates me so much. They’re completely different words!
- dang 4y agoA 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?"
- srl 4y agoIt seems likely that this is the cartoon, but I can't figure out what the original source is: https://www.jokejive.com/images/jokejive/23/23a74af0b0d51ee4307ee66c8c25ac74.jpeg https://www.jokejive.com/images/jokejive/23/23a74af0b0d51ee4...
- dang 4y agoWow, thanks! That's the one. Funny how memory drift made it different in my head...but it has been many years. How did you find that? Now if someone can figure out the source, that would be even more amazing.
- akiselev 4y agoI believe it's in Vertigo Park And Other Tall Tales by Mark O'Donnell but it's appeared in the Spy magazine December 1987 before that. If you search Google Books for "Do you not be happy with me as the translator of the books of you" and click on the Preview or Full View button you should see it in several places
- dang 4y agoThe submitted URL was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke. There's also: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/english-as-she-is-spoke-1884 https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/english-as-she-is-... https://muse.jhu.edu/article/173644 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/173644
- WalterBright 4y agoMy favorite mistranslation came from the first time the Olympics were in China. One of the food vendors hung up a banner "401 Not Found".
- dang 4y agoOther examples here, including the famous Welsh road sign translation ("I am not in the office at the moment"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21502019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21502019
- dkdbejwi383 4y agoI’d be interested in a source for this if you have one
- WalterBright 4y agoIt was a photo posted on Reddit at the time, if I recall correctly.
- dumb1224 4y agoMe too. It was a very old meme from my college days in China back in 2000. There were only very few at that time and one was that. I've always wondered if it's true.
- coupdejarnac 4y agoThis stuff happens in China all the time. If you visit, you'll surely see some hilarious mistranslations. Probably not what the above poster was referring to, but here's a sample: https://www.reddit.com/r/engrish/comments/q1g8sh/a_restaurant_in_china_the_owner_of_this/ https://www.reddit.com/r/engrish/comments/q1g8sh/a_restauran...
- dang 4y agoRelated: English as She Is Spoke - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25784683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25784683 - Jan 2021 (129 comments)
- dwighttk 4y agoMy postilion has been struck by lightning
- dang 4y agoThe 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 4y agoI 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
- Reventlov 4y agoWe have the exact same idioms in French for the last two (battre le fer pendant qu'il est encore chaud, and revenir à nos moutons) !
- kwhitefoot 4y ago> battre le fer pendant qu'il est encore chaud Do people actually say that? Seems very long winded.
- johnaspden 4y agoUsing the power of not pronouncing most of the letters and speaking very very fast, they can get it down to: batlefe pend ki letencoshow which is more manageable.
- waterpowder 4y agoNot super often but yes, although we'd often skip the "encore"
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- chadlavi 4y agoFeed this into ChatGPT
- Turing_Machine 4y agoDefinitely 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 4y agoGalactic Pot Healer by Philip K. Dick has some examples of this too
- IncRnd 4y 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!
- cja 4y agoThis 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
- chris_wot 4y agoI first read about this in Stephen Pile's The Book of Heroic Failures. He seemed particular taken with the phrase "To craunch a mamoset".
- PinkMilkshake 4y agoI 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
- azangru 4y agoThe scanned copy of the book at Internet Archive [0] is probably a better representation of this text than the pdf made from a Word document that the title links to. [0] - https://archive.org/details/englishassheissp00applrich/page/n1/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/englishassheissp00applrich/page/...