The Elder Statesman

By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here

A little bit of knowledge of a foreign language is dangerous, especially when it comes to speaking it, I’ve learned this hard lesson because I took Spanish in high school – a Southern high school where we said “Usted All.”

Over the years I’ve tried to practice my Spanish and  embarrassed myself in the process. Once I was on a newspaper assignment in Matamoros, Mexico I was invited to a hacienda barbecue at one of the ranches. The barbecued meat was goat.

When my host asked if I knew what the meat was, I immediately practiced my Spanish and proudly said it was cabrón, the word for goat I had learned from my Southern high school Spanish class. My host went into a laughing hysteria and shared this gringo guffaw with the other guests who also laughed. Finally my host explained the word had a different meaning to the natives none for polite company. Bastard is about the nearest I can come to a translation.

I once wanted to get off a crowded bus in Mexico City and kept saying escusame

to the fellow passengers. I noticed they gave me a funny look, but it wasn’t until someone tapped me on the shoulder and said in perfect English, “you are asking to go to the bathroom.”

Dining in a restaurant in Washington, D.C. where all the waiters spoke Spanish, the guest at the table next to mine repeatedly asked the waiter for butter, but there was a clear language barrier. Finally, I intervened and told the waiter “la mantequilla por favor,” he immediately understood my request, but I could not convince him it was for the next table and not for me. I finally resolved the issue by hand delivering the butter to the next table myself.

A fan of my newspaper column, Charlie Becherer of Roseburg, likes to tease me with funnies he finds on the internet. Recently he sent me a collection of language translations in advertising that went awry.

The U.S. Dairy Association has had a huge success with its “Got milk?” campaign in the U.S. but when it was decided to expand the advertising into Mexico the association soon learned that “Got Milk?” translated to “Are you lactating?” in Spanish.

An American T-shirt company in Miami printed thousands of T-shirts for the Spanish market to coincide with the Pope’s visit that said “I Saw the Pope,” but the misprint read “I saw the Potato.” It was a little matter of gender. Instead of saying “el Papa” the masculine gender, the company used “la papa,” which translates as “potato.”

When the Parker Pen Co. marketed a ball-point pen in Mexico, the ads were intended to say the pen “won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you.” The company thought the word “embarazar” meant to embarrass. So the ad red “It won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant.” Embaraza means to impregnate.

A U.S. chicken company used a slogan “It takes a strong man to make a tender chicken,’ but it translated in Spanish as “it takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate.”

Unfortunately these language goofs are not all in Spanish translations.

Clairol is said to have introduced its “Mist Stick” curling iron to its German market only to discover the word “mist” didn’t translate too well. In German it is a slang word for “manure,” and few people would be willing to use a “Manure Stick” to curl their hair.

Coca Cola researched 40,00 Chinese characters to find a phonetic equivalent term for Coca Cola and finally chose “Kokou Kole,” which literally translated into “Happiness in the Mouth.” The first choice tried in China was kekoukela, but that translated into “bite the wax tadpole.”

Pepsi was not to be outdone. Its slogan “Come alive with the Pepsi Generation,” was discovered to translate  as “Pepsi brings your ancestors from the grave.”

Little wonder my English professor in college went ballistic when he heard the first telephone commercial for Winston cigarettes that said the cigarette “tastes good like a cigarette should.” I think I will translate that English grammar guffaw in Spanish just to see if it could be grammatically correct south of the border.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing either in English or Spanish to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 8:00 am and is filed under Column. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.