Ainsley Harriott, it turns out, is a celebrity chef in England, where words often have different meaning than they do here. The Queen’s English is not Amer’can English. (Be careful saying the word “fanny” in England, as in “fanny pack”; it means something completely different there.) “Prick with a fork” is a very innocent thing to say over there — not so much here.
Another good example of how things don’t translate was an old marketing campaign by Electrolux, the Swedish vacuum maker. They had a very successful ad campaign in Sweden and someone with the company decided to just translate the ads straight into English and run them here, unaware of any potential American English idioms. That’s how we got the ad slogan “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.”
June 18th, 2009 at 9:30 am
Ainsley Harriott, it turns out, is a celebrity chef in England, where words often have different meaning than they do here. The Queen’s English is not Amer’can English. (Be careful saying the word “fanny” in England, as in “fanny pack”; it means something completely different there.) “Prick with a fork” is a very innocent thing to say over there — not so much here.
Another good example of how things don’t translate was an old marketing campaign by Electrolux, the Swedish vacuum maker. They had a very successful ad campaign in Sweden and someone with the company decided to just translate the ads straight into English and run them here, unaware of any potential American English idioms. That’s how we got the ad slogan “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.”