Lost in Translation

For someone who loves to talk, it's almost a punishment to live in a culture that doesn't speak the same language as you do. In Indonesia, most of the populace (and even most household help) spoke no English at all, and even simple tasks like shopping for vegetables was very stress-producing. I spent almost three years learning Bahasa, which has absolutely no relevance to English words at all. I probably learned more on the golf course with my caddie and felt fairly competent when we left that I could hold my own, at least for routine taks. I was even able to deliver a simple speech before the women's club in Bahasa. So now that we're in Angola and Portuguese is the national language here, I am starting at square one. But I must say, I am quite enjoying the challenge and love the discovery of new words and how they are formed. At least many Portuguese words can be deciphered because of their similarity to English. And if I am stuck for a vocabulary word, I just try adding a "são" (pronounced as a nasal "soun"), and sometimes I am right after all! Of course, there's always the liability of embarrassing yourself by making an error in pronunciation or vocabulary. One of our favorite stories in Indonesia was when Allan posted a sign on our bird aviary, thinking he was telling the guards not to feed the birds, when in reality, he was asking them not to eat the birds. So I asked him to please check with his secretary before delivering a speech in Bahasa. We've had some interesting twists here as well. When my Portuguese teacher asked me if there were unfamiliar words in the text, I told her I didn't know the word advogado. She told me it meant liar. I found that strange to put in a book, and then it dawned on me that she was saying lawyer, which wasn't clear because of her accent. We laughed about it when I explained to her what I thought she said and then finished by saying, "Well, actually, a lot of lawyers are liars." The latest almost-error was a week ago when I got my hair cut pretty short. As the stylist was blow-drying it, I was searching my mind for the vocaulary word to tell her I looked like a little duck (pequeno pato), but all that came to my mind was pequeno peito. I was later relieved that I had withheld my comment when I looked the word up in my dictionary. Peito is the word for breast.