Today I was explaining to someone how difficult it can be for me to navigate the differences between languages. To illustrate, I ended up describing a bus ride I once took in Brazil from Rio de Janeiro to Sao Paulo.<\/p>\n
It was quite a long trip, so along the way the bus driver stopped at a rest stop, which contained a little snack bar, a rest room, etc. I found myself running into a surprising number of language barriers just trying to use the rest room.<\/p>\n
First off, to enter the rest room, I needed to go through a door labeled with a word which is pronounced “Push”. In Portuguese, this word means “Pull”.<\/p>\n
Then I needed to decide exactly which restroom to enter. One of the doors had a big “M” on the door. It turned out that the “M” stood for “Mulheres”, which is Portuguese for “Women”.<\/p>\n
Once inside, I needed to figure out which tap was for hot water and which was for cold water. Just like in the U.S., one of the taps had a big letter “C” on it. Except in Portuguese, the “C” stands for “Calore”, which means “Hot”.<\/p>\n
I wonder whether Brazilians visiting the U.S. for the first time are as confused about our signage as I was about theirs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today I was explaining to someone how difficult it can be for me to navigate the differences between languages. To illustrate, I ended up describing a bus ride I once took in Brazil from Rio de Janeiro to Sao Paulo. It was quite a long trip, so along the way the bus driver stopped at … Continue reading “Lost in translation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18042"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18042"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18043,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18042\/revisions\/18043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}