Their English may be funny, but it's better than my Japanese

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, tour guides, parodies

I made some attempt to learn Japanese after marrying a woman from Japan, I really did. But I was already almost thirty, and the ol' memory was just harder to train by then. Two events convinced me I'd always need an interpreter.

Once, in a Japanese restaurant with my parents, I signaled the waitress and asked for water: mizu-o kudasai. She replied, yombai ma. I looked up in confusion, and she held up four fingers. As I struggled to catch my mental breath, my wife said quietly, "She's asking if she should bring water for all four of us" (yon is 4). I blurted, Hai, domo (Yes, thanks), and stayed pretty quiet for the rest of the evening.

On our first visit to Japan to meet my in-laws, I just listened, or spoke through my wife's interpretation, for a few days. Then one day, standing up, I hit my head on the doorway. I don't recall exactly what I said to my mother-in-law, but my intention was to say, "I am too big." Instead, I said something like, "I'm way too much." She fell to the floor, laughing until she cried. If you've never seen a woman of nearly seventy years, in a kimono, rolling on the floor, you're fortunate.

With those experiences (and a few other groaners) in mind, I picked up Here Speeching American: a very strange guide to English as it is garbled around the world by Kathryn Petras and Ross Petras, with some trepidation, I might add. The cover proudly proclaims, "Bestselling authors of The 776 Stupidest Things Ever Said.'' I almost have to look that one up...

A book like this almost writes itself. The work is in quote-gathering. With friends and correspondents around the world, one saves a lot of travel. The breadth of coverage is impressive.We're all aware of things like the L/R confusion the Chinese and Japanese experience...they have no L or R in their languages, but a kind of rolled D that sounds like both. So things like "Lental Video", "Rens Creaner" and "Burgel with Flies" are to be expected. Word mixups are more interesting, such as the title quote, found in Mallorca, Spain. The quotes that are genuinely fun are the mixups between noun, verb, and adjective forms: "Pork with Spicy" (a restaurant in Taipei) or "Foot Wearing Prohibited" (a Buddhist temple in Burma...they meant "footwear").

There are malaprops and other misplaced words: "Before going to work, have a few lapses in our pool" (a Bangkok hotel), or "Compulsory Buffet Breakfast" (Vietnam). And the inevitable Spoonerism: "Traffic may be conges to subjection" (Hong Kong).

However, for the most part, I found it a bit unsettling, making fun of others' ignorance. I've made it a practice, when I see something that is clearly a bad translation, to rewrite it (if it is short) and send the copy, with my compliments, to the company, if they want the chance to republish correctly. I figure, most of the time, they don't; many such items are one-off runs and won't be repeated. But I sometimes wonder what kind of business I could build on quick, low-cost proofreading via Email.