Conversations

Elaine and I stopped at our favorite “hole-in-the-wall” Chinese fast-food restaurant and ordered our meals at the counter before sitting down at a table. When the server arrived with our meals, we found out that she had only very recently come to the United States from Hong Kong. I asked her if the food here was close to the food where she grew up. She stared at us in utter confusion and exclaimed, “Oh no! Hong maybe fourteen hours by airplane!”

That is wonderful—and the best part is that both sides of the conversation made perfect sense.

There’s something particularly charming about the “utter confusion” preceding the answer. From her perspective, two perfectly pleasant Americans had apparently just asked whether the Chinese takeout restaurant down the road was somewhere in the vicinity of Hong Kong.

It also illustrates something interesting about learning a language. Vocabulary is only half the battle. The word close has several meanings that native speakers switch among without noticing: physically nearby, similar in character, nearly correct, emotionally intimate. You automatically intended “similar”; she automatically selected “nearby.”

Do you have any examples of famous real life language snafus?

Absolutely. Some of the best-known ones range from genuinely documented mistakes to stories that have become legends. A few are especially good because, like your Hong Kong encounter, everyone involved is being perfectly reasonable.

• Jimmy Carter’s 1977 visit to Poland. This one really happened, although later retellings embellish it. Carter’s interpreter rendered some of his remarks into Polish in bizarre ways. Carter’s expression of interest in the Polish people’s “desires for the future” reportedly came across with a sexual connotation, and a reference to leaving the United States was rendered in a way suggesting he had abandoned America permanently. The interpreter was replaced for subsequent appearances. It became one of diplomatic history’s classic translation disasters.
• Nikita Khrushchev’s “We will bury you.” This wasn’t exactly a mistranslation, but it was a disastrous translation of an idiom. Khrushchev’s 1956 Russian remark, “My vas pokhoronim,” entered English as “We will bury you.” During the Cold War that sounded very much like “We will kill you.” His intended meaning was closer to “We will outlast you and be present at your funeral”—i.e., communism would survive capitalism. Still belligerent, but substantially different from a threat of annihilation.
• John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Here’s a famous snafu that wasn’t one. The enduring story says Kennedy accidentally announced, “I am a jelly doughnut,” because a Berliner can be a pastry. Germans understood him perfectly well as saying, “I am a Berliner.” In fact, the construction he used was appropriate for someone speaking figuratively rather than claiming literally to have been born in Berlin. The audience didn’t burst into laughter at his German. The “jelly doughnut” story became famous largely because it’s too good a story to die.
• “Mokusatsu” and the Potsdam Declaration. This is the serious one. In 1945 Japanese premier Kantarō Suzuki used mokusatsu when discussing the Allied Potsdam Declaration. The word can carry senses ranging from “withhold comment” to “ignore/treat with contempt.” English-language reporting emphasized the latter interpretation. It’s sometimes claimed that this mistranslation caused the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. That’s far too strong—the historical decisions were much more complicated—but it remains a celebrated example of how an ambiguous word can become enormously consequential in international affairs.

And then there’s a category I particularly enjoy: advertising translation legends. You’ve probably heard that Chevrolet couldn’t sell the Nova in Latin America because no va means “doesn’t go.” Great story; essentially a myth. Spanish speakers don’t normally parse Nova that way, and the car actually sold reasonably well in Spanish-speaking markets.

There’s a pattern here I find fascinating: some of our most famous language mistakes are themselves mistranslated, exaggerated, or completely mythical.

Your Hong Kong story is almost a textbook example of the purest variety. Nothing was mistranslated. The sentence was grammatical. The individual words were understood. The problem was simply that “close” meant one perfectly sensible thing in your head and another perfectly sensible thing in hers.

Those are my favorites because nobody actually made a mistake. The language did.