In Which Someone ELSE gets to screw up the language

As I continue slogging my way through the Spanish language (today, I asked the airport officer when the ¨Room of Faithful Hoping¨ would be available to us...), I feel equality demands that I also report on the most hilarious English translations I´ve come across in my travels. These are wildly more common here in Argentina, I think because Ecuador really hasn´t gotten around to translating many things yet.

At any rate, Tuesday´s lunch menu was truly a thing of beauty and a joy forever. One could enjoy pizza with a wide range of toppings, including ¨sauce, chicken, crash, onions, and mozzarella¨. Crash was also available on a pizza without chicken, but I couldn´t be sure that meat was not involved. For dessert, one´s choices included ¨sucker in syrup, with cheese¨ and a complicated sampler platter including both ¨salad of fruit¨ and ¨one rejects of ice cream¨, lovingly enveloped in ¨sauce frit and sauce snare¨. However, the menu´s piece de resistance was clearly in the meat section: a savory meal of ¨language of cow, to the vinegar.¨

We had to know who created this linguistic masterpiece, so I asked the waiter how, exactly, the menu came about. He was hilarious: ¨Well, this woman who used to live here translated it for us, but I think she just ran it through a computer program. None of us read English, so we have no idea what it says, but we see people laughing at it all the time. I was watching you both a few minutes ago, and I told my buddy over there, look, they´re laughing at our menu again.¨ He enjoyed the explanation about, where, exactly, the cow tongue had gone a bit awry, but seemed quite happy to leave well enough alone with the menu.

At the farewell dinner for the Project in Quito, we discovered that the menu had been recently translated as well. I don´t remember most of the mistakes, but very much enjoyed the description of quimbolitos, which are like sweet fluffy tamales, as involving a ¨sweet corn feeling¨. Adam was reminded of a cafe he´d visited once which attempted to translate ¨te¨ (tea) into English: because that seemed very very close to the second person possessive, the end result was a delicious glass of Ice You. Rumor has it there is a burger joint outside of Cuenca which offers a wide variety of ¨fats foot¨.

Ah well, we all more or less manage to get our points across.