‘Hi Daniel, what’s up?’ ‘Eh? What’s up? Where up? I can’t see anything up.’ In this way I began a conversation with an American student at a language camp. I didn’t know then that the phrase ‘What’s up?’ can also mean ‘What’s new?’ or ‘How are you?’ (especially in American English), and that’s why I turned my head up to look for something imaginary on the ceiling.
The different spellings and pronunciation of English words is a common problem, which often leads students to confuse similar words. A student describing her grandfather said, ‘My granddad’s got a long bird.’ She surely wanted to say a long beard. When I told the class why I was smiling, they burst out laughing. Since then they have perfectly remembered the correct pronunciation of the two words: bird [bә:d], and beard [biәd]. For a British native speaker the situation would be funny for a different reason. In English the word bird does not refer to an intimate part of the male body (besides a flying creature, of course) as it does in Slovak, but it’s a way of referring to a young woman. It can sound mildly offensive, however, so don’t use it unless you want to be impolite (in Slovak, we would say pipka or buchta).
The spelling of many English words is difficult. Confusion with even one letter can result in a pretty funny change in the meaning of a sentence. I once read a translation of the song ‘Katka’ from Slovak into English in a newspaper: ‘Tá čo chce ťa milovať, byť milovaná, líhať s tebou... ’ ‘I want to love you, be loved, laying with you... ’ Whether it was a typing error or the translator’s unfamiliarity with the two words, instead of lay/laying, it should have read lie/lying. We can lay a book on the table, or we can lay the table (get it ready for a meal), or a hen can lay an egg, but we can’t lay/be laying on a bed (we can lie/be lying on the bed). So the translator made Katka lay something with her boyfriend instead of lie with him.
Problems and funny sentences are sometimes caused by incorrectly applied homonyms (words which are spelt and pronounced identically, but have different meanings). A student once wrote in his project work: ‘I often listen to the tower.’ He had looked up the English equivalent tower for the Slovak word veža in a pocket dictionary. He didn’t suppose, however, that veža for listening to music and veža as a building aren’t homonyms in English and should have used hi-fi system or stereo instead. He could hardly listen to the tower.
We can sometimes hear or read a funny translation when a sentence contains an idiom (a group of words whose meaning is different from the meanings of the individual words), e.g. in a dubbed film. ‘Dal mi prázdny šek, aby som si vybrala vhodné topánky.’ In the original: ‘He gave me a blank cheque to choose the right boots.’ The translator probably thought that the woman had been given a signed cheque to write the amount of money needed for buying new shoes. The woman, however, paid for the boots in cash. ‘To give somebody a blank cheque' can also mean to let somebody do what they think is necessary or good in a particular situation. So the correct translation in this case would be: ‘Nechal mi voľnú ruku pri výbere vhodných topánok.’
The English language has several geographical variants, among which British English and American English are the most prevalent. There are some differences in grammar, vocabulary, spelling and pronunciation between them. If you ask for chips in a fast food restaurant, in Britain you will be given what Americans call French fries (hranolky), but in the USA you will get what the British call crisps (čipsy).
If a Londoner and a New Yorker tell you that they live on the first floor, they don’t mean the same thing. The Londoner lives on what the New Yorker calls the second floor (prvé poschodie), but the New Yorker lives on what the Londoner calls the ground floor (prízemie).
In a dubbed American sitcom a man told his friends in a restaurant, ‘Musím ísť do kúpeľne.’ In the original he said, ‘I must go to the bathroom.’ In the following scene he was relieving himself into a urinal. There was no bath or shower, however. The translator probably didn’t watch the scene properly and didn’t realize that in American English to go to the bathroom can also mean to go to the toilet.
If you have experienced some funny and confusing situations while using English, don’t hesitate to share them. See you.
