From Dick Dell’s Christmas Letter

Our friend editor and publisher Dick Dell sends out a letter this time of year recounting some of the year’s episodes among friends and family. As usual, we can’t resist an excerpt:

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At lunch with a close friend, I told him that Sam and Patty were coming for dinner the next day. He said, “You’re going to have salmon patties for dinner? Are you using my recipe?” I said, “Marvin, read my lips. I said Sam and Patty are coming for dinner. We’re having an old man’s conversation here.” He said, “Why shouldn’t we have an old man’s conversation? We’re old men.”

And speaking of language mixups, the worst come in translations. After several decades of overseeing the translation of English language publications into Arabic, European, and Asian languages, I can tell you the problems are horrendous. The wife of John Steinbeck was once told by a Tokyo store clerk that they had his book Angry Grapes in stock.

Watching the Beijing Olympics, I asked Nora why the Kenyans were such good long distance runners. She said, “Probably because they’ve been chased by lions and white colonialists for 200 years.”

2 Comments »

1. Our language mix-ups have been passed on to the Robots. Carl Sagan would tell the story of an early language interpreter that translated the phrase “Out of sight, out of mind” from English to Russian and then back to English. It ended up with “Blind idiot”.

   Comment by Mark — December 20, 2008 @ 11:11 am

2. Great example. One human equivalent comes to mind — the Scandinavians who launched a new U.S. campaign to sell their vacuum cleaners with the slogan, “Nothing Sucks Like Electrolux.”

   Comment by Al — December 20, 2008 @ 2:54 pm

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