venta

In the last week or so, I've been doing a smidgeon of Eclipse plug-in development at work. Nothing serious, just packaging our nice shiny new plug-in into a branded product. It's now (mostly) working, but I feel like I haven't much to show for my labours. Most of the changes I've made have been of the "check this check box" kind. Sadly, anyone viewing the end result will not realise the n hours of googling misery which went into determining which box to check.

This afternoon I was once again grappling with an intractable problem and, having found no help in the documentation, was wading through newsgroup posts from aeons ago.

I eventually found this post which addresses exactly the problem I was having. It took me several goes to digest it, because the writer is obviously not someone with English as a first language. I should add that I'm not attempting to diss the guy[*] - he provided the information I needed, and his English is way better than my second language.

But it did get me thinking about uses of idiom in English. Mostly because Jan uses two phrases which really made me laugh - in each case I think I know the phrase he was aiming at, but he's missed.

Here's the first:

"It took my some time to get behind the sheets and to understand what the problem was."

And the second:

"Second, when you do not know what to do, you are left back in the rain."

In both cases it sounds rather like he's taken an idiom in his own language, and translated it directly into English. Except both these phrases exist in English too - I'm assuming he means "under the covers" (possibly crossed with "behind the scenes") and "out in the cold".

Is it just mis-remembering of English idiom which he's heard, or do these same phrases exist in other languages ?

One of my favourite writers of brain-bubblegum is Iain Pears - as well as the rather erudite Instance of the Fingerpost, he also writes light, fluffy art-world whodunnits. One of his detective characters is the Italian Flavia di Stefano, who collects English idiom (idia?) and, around once a book, gets one wrong.

I've always found this a bit implausible. The one which springs to mind is her commenting about someone trying to push cotton in her eyes, and her boyfriend correcting her: you pull wool over someone's eyes. I didn't think that sort of mistake would get made. It sounds like something made up to be deliberately funny, but maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps my English-as-a-second[**]-language friends are just too damn good at it and don't make errors.

I'm sure the internet is full of alledged mistranslations and mistakes by appropriately humorous foreigners. But does anyone have any good genuine examples to hand ?

[*] At least, I'm assuming that Jan is a Teutonic-ish male name. I guess it could just as well be a female name, short for Janet or something.

[**] At least. Bother Claudia and her being quicker witted than I am while speaking her third language.