Re: traduccion

jason varsoke (jjv@caesun.msd.ray.com)
Tue, 19 Oct 1999 12:22:12 -0400 (EDT) 

ok Matt, I can do you one better.

   I was in Wien (Vienna) wanding around the city with one year of German
under my belt.  I'd had various encounters, trying my german on the
Sausage Kiosk guy and so on.  I got up my nerve to hit a tabacco shop for
some postcards.  I grabbed a few out side, strutted in and said.

  "Ich mueste zwolf Postkarten, bitte."

   and he replies, "How many would you like?"  Ugh.

   Okay so then he tells me that he doesn't have any stamps and I should
come back in an hour.  Four hours later I return and see his mother (about
70yo.) inside.  I'm delighted.  I'm sure she doesn't speak English.  He's
my chance.  I look up the word for stamps in my dictionary and saunter
inside.
 
   "Ich mueste zwolf Stampfen, bitte."

   and she just gives me a strange look.

   Then I make a stamping action with my hands.

   and she gives me an even stranger look.

   Then I pull out the postcards and she exclaims, "Briefmarke!"

   Okay, so I felt pretty dumb, but that's how things go in another
language.  But I told it to my German friend and he started roaring.  Then
he told me that first I asked her to Stamp on the Ground 12 times.  Then
the stamping hand motion that I did was the equivalent to the American
index finger through an 'O' made with the opposite hand's thumb and index
finger (screwing).  So this old woman certainly had an intersting opinions
on americans after I left.

________oOOOo__/~~~~\__oOOOo_____________________________________
Jason Varsoke                                jvarsoke@bigfoot.com
Ich will nicht ein Amerikaner, der nur eine Sprache kennt sterben



On Mon, 18 Oct 1999, Matt Kozusko wrote:

> Mattis Fishman wrote:
> 
> Hello, Mattis!   
> 
> > Vuestro amigo,
> > Mattis
> 
> I tried using the informal second person plural this summer in
> Madrid.  Nobody understood me.  People just looked at me and blinked. 
> Of course, they did that pretty much no matter what I said, so who
> knows what the problem was.  Anyway, all of this interlingual
> pondering reminded me of an especially funny thing that happened to me
> in a department store off the Plaza del Sol.  I was looking for a
> particular pair of shoes that I have never seen in the U.S. but that
> seem to appear in abundance overseas.  I'd been through about six
> shoes-only stores with no luck, so I began trying bigger stores that
> had shoe departments.  I had pretty good success finding shoe
> departments by looking for signs that said "rebajas" on them--I was
> pretty sure the word for "shoes" was "zapatos," but every shoe store
> I'd been in at that point had featured big "rebajas" signs in the
> windows.  Same thing.  Textbook Spanish versus real Spanish.  After
> mere seconds of wandering around this department store, I found the
> "rebajas" section and, much to my delight, the shoes I was looking
> for.  As the shoes were being rung up, I thought I'd entertain the
> salesperson with some idle banter.  I ran over a few Spanish phrases
> in my head to be sure I had them right before I attempted them.  Then
> I uttered, in Spanish, with great confidence and an especially crisp
> accent, "so, zapatos and rebajas are the same thing, are they?".  I
> fairly beamed with anticipated success.  It had sounded truly lovely. 
> I was obviously not a native speaker, but here I had demonstrated both
> my eloquence and my savvy in the native tongue.  The salesperson
> blinked.  Silence.  I blinked.  More silence.  "No," she replied, in
> perfect English, "'zapatos' are shoes; 'rebajas' are sales."    
> 
> 
> -- 
> Matt Kozusko    mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu
>