I
currently spend a lot of time teaching English to adults in Spain and Latin America.
My students are wonderful people and because of this I’ve learned a lot about
them and their various cultures. Given that Spanish is such a widely spoken
language I feel slightly guilty teaching them English because their predominant
reason for studying is because English happens to have become the language used
in business, so much so that one or two of the students have described business
meetings conducted in English in which the majority of the participants were
native Spanish speakers and in fact occasionally all the participants spoke Spanish.
Apparently though the Spanish spoken in the various Latin American countries
can be very different to that spoken in Spain, from time to time resulting in embarrassing
misunderstandings! Just as in the case of British and American English. (If you
know what the American equivalent to ‘falling on my backside’ is, you will know
what I mean.*)
One
of the most interesting lessons I’ve learned is how similar, when translated,
most Spanish and English idioms and expressions are. Often the difference is
minimal. We might describe ourselves as having so much work it’s ‘up to my
eyeballs’ whereas the Spaniards would describe it being ‘up to my eyebrows’.
Perhaps when they’re overworked the Spanish have even more to do, which
wouldn’t surprise me as despite the stereotypical ‘manana’ attitude I heard
Spaniards being labelled with when I was growing up, the first thing I noticed about
my Spanish students is how long they worked each day. Their office hours are
much longer than the standard hours in the UK. (Also did you know that many
Mexicans only have just over a week of holiday allowance!) Of course, the
similarity in the form of these phrases we use is down to our common human experience
and the images we can draw on from the world around us to describe them. One of
my favourites that a student introduced to me recently when she had to take
responsibility for a task at work was ‘the ball’s in my roof’. I was perplexed
by this until my wife reminded me about ‘the ball’s in my court’ which I
suppose is similar, though I still find it easier to imagine a ball ending up
on one side of a tennis court than the roof of a house!
One
other cause of confusion can come when we use the same words or expressions but
pronounced them differently. Spanish speakers use the term WiFi but pronounce
it as ‘wiffy’. One of my students was about to embark on a business trip to
London (I note this was over a year ago) and declared that it would be important
for him on arriving in his hotel to ask if they had really strong wiffy. I was
glad to help prevent a diplomatic misunderstanding. I was also confused when a
student told me he had been to ‘oosa’ for his holidays. ‘Yes,’ he explained,
‘We travelled all across oosa – New York, Chicago, Los Angeles…’ It turns out
that Spanish speakers say more acronyms as words than we do.
Speaking
of stereotypes – and it’s one of the reasons I feel it’s a shame that we don’t
have, or use, a universal language, such as Latin or Esperanto, that doesn’t in
some way ‘belong’ to a certain culture, or cultural group - I’m sure most of us
would agree that the proportion of people who are bi- or multi- lingual is
embarrassingly greater outside the United Kingdom. Arguably resulting in there
being some truth in the assertion that in general we consider the teaching of
languages as being less significant than elsewhere. The associated stereotype
is the Brit who speaks increasingly more loudly when trying, hopelessly of
course, to get his or her message across to a non-native speaker.
I
was quietly rather pleased on one occasion to discover that this behaviour
isn’t exclusively the preserve of the English. My wife and I moved to France
five years ago into an old house with equally elderly heating arrangements. (A
log fire is romantic in September when it fights off the chill of the evening –
but ####y useless in actual wintertime.) So, we wanted to buy a paraffin heater
to provide extra back-up when needed. We found one in our local DIY and explained
that this was what we wanted to one of the assistants. She explained to us –
that much we understood – that we need to buy something extra to enable the
heater to function. This extra requirement was named a ‘pile’ apparently –
pronounced ‘peel’. Neither Jan or I could quite understand why we may possibly
require some form of medication in order to operate a paraffin heater and both
looked blankly back at the assistant. She repeated the word ‘peel’ more loudly.
No doubt like the archetypal Brits in this situation she thought all foreigners
are hard of hearing. Of course, this didn’t help, and she repeated ‘PEEL’ more
loudly and in a more aggravated tone. (Ref. British stereotype.) Fortunately,
this did bring some benefit as the loud peal of ‘PEEL’ throughout the building
brought one of her colleagues to investigate. She explained the ‘pile’ is the
French for battery.
Well
kind of… I now of course, after this memorable lesson, reasonably thought I
knew the French for battery. So sometime later when I went into a garage
needing a new battery for a car, I told the assistant that I needed a ‘pile’.
He looked at me a little oddly I thought, as though I was wasting his time, and
rather pointedly at the supermarket across the way. Somewhat grudgingly he then
directed me towards a corner of the workshop. As I walked towards the display he’d
indicated I noticed that he’d directed me passed shelves laden with car
batteries. The display he’d sent me to housed an array of torch batteries.
‘No’, I explained, returning to the assistant, ‘I need a ‘pile’ for my car’.
‘Ah!’ he replied, finally understanding why the mad Englishman had come here
just to buy a single torch battery. ‘You mean ‘batterie’.’
Car
batteries are ‘batteries’ and torch batteries are ‘piles’.
Obvious
really! Gnn.
*If
you don’t I’m not going to tell you!
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