Dunglish

First, I am sorry for not posting so much. Thanks for all the corrections, don’t get mad, just tell me, I can take it and I will correct it.

(And to the ‘person’ who voted for the Dutch extreme right party in the last election and thinks they are justified in threatening me here or anybody else, you’re just sad.)

Public transport posters are fun, especially after a night on the town. I won’t analyse it, it just needs some therapy.

I know this video was made with enthusiasm, Alex, it was a good video. Finally having the world’s biggest passenger plane, an Airbus A380, land at Schiphol airport is a big deal in aviation. However, you really need to brush up on your English and ideally your pronunciation. The first bit of music was very cool by the way.

All Alex needed to do was to record his enthusiasm in Dutch and put subtitles on it. I would have enjoyed this video more in Dutch, especially that smooth r in Polderbaan.

I like the plural of feet = feets (foot, feet)
‘testing their photographic gears’ = another interesting plural
‘wild parking’ = parking all over the place, willy nilly, illegally
This plane is apparently male! (here he is!)
Oh dear, he can’t abbreviationabbreviate kilograms either – it’s kg internationally
He says dockED and not DOCKED, a rookie mistake
‘Later on the evening’ = later IN the evening, another rookie mistake

(Thanks Roel!)

Darn those pesky hour notations!

1. We don’t use ‘th’ for dates in this context, and repeating April is useless.
2. We don’t put 0 in front of hours (8:30)
3. Nobody uses ‘hrs’ in English.
4.’16.00′ is not the evening, it’s still afternoon, beer or no beer in hand.
5. Yes, British English do sometimes use one ‘full stop’ for time notation, I use a colon (’:') like the rest of the world and my mobile phone.

There’s lots more wrong, but I don’t have the time (snap).

And the rest makes me dizzy. It reads like cut and paste grammar gone bezerk. But, yes, we do know what they’re on and on and on about.

(Thanks Jannelies!)

This parody is full of Dutchisms, Dunglish and clichés.
The scary part is I know some people who talk like this and are not doing stand-up comedy.

Enjoy!

(Thanks: Marie!)

Yes, we know what they are trying to say, but the Dunglish doesn’t even come close to the Dutch original. First, I want to address the language problem, then the big honking cultural problem.

The Dutch roughly says, ‘Do you do it like this at home, too?’ and then the message is lost in translation, never mind ‘your’ that got botched up (’youre’).

The big honking issue here is the unfortunate ‘Dutch rudeness’. Pointing out bad behaviour in puppy-peed-on-the-carpet style gets you nowhere with the rest of us mortals. ‘Please pick up after yourself’. Thank you’ is the way to go, no matter how irritated you are. And then the Dunglish won’t matter as much.

(Thanks Arjen!)

The song is a nicely performed rock and roll number by Marc Verhaegen and his orchestra (band), but with a totally Dunglish title: ‘I Feel Me a King’, a direct translation of ‘Ik voel mij een koning’, which should be ‘I Feel Like a King’.

Let the record show (pun) that his accent is pretty darn good otherwise.

You can hear this beauty too right here.

(Link and photo: Showcase (Frits Jonker of the Fool’s Gold column in Dutch comic strip magazine Zone5300), via @waa on Twitter, thanks!)

American musician John Mayer was a guest on De Wereld Draait Door this week, an upbeat, trendy Dutch talk show. I know from very reliable sources that the show tends to avoid inviting non-Dutch speaking guests unless they are tennis star André Agassi (a few weeks ago) and in this case, the handsome John Meyer.

The cute joke made by the woman asking John Meyer if he was ‘lonely’ is a nice piece of Dunglish although totally on purpose. The woman asked if John was ‘poodle naked’, which was an excuse to say ‘butt naked’ in Dutch on telly and obvisouly make an assumption that he’d be very good looking naked.

Click on this link to get to 4:30 where the fun starts.

Happy New Year to you all!
It’s been a while, but I’m back.

The site of the city of Wageningen is written in whatever English. They surely have the money and time to do it right, but obviously don’t care. Does it matter? Well, it’s a crappy way to promote your city if you care this little about communicating properly.

One particularly sloppy section:

“First registrion:
If you are planning to stay in Wageningen for more than four month, you have to register at te population register of de manicipality in Wageningen.”

(Thanks, Robin!)

In the category ‘why use proper Dutch when bastard English will do’, I dare you to try and guess from the logo what these people sell if you didn’t see this advert on telly like I did.

The name of the company requires what I like to refer to as ‘aural squinting’. If you read this slowly and pretend to speak Dutch, you may even pronouce it as… insured! That’s right, this is an insurance company, turning what my best friend calls ‘brown karma’ into something pink and happy. No, wait, that’s ‘heppie’ (Dutch pronunciation of ‘happy’, which sounds like ‘hippy’), as in Hotel Heppie, a holiday house for, I assume, underprivileged children who deserve a holiday. The company surely has good reason to plug this, but the name is ‘reedeeculooos’.

Does this work for anybody? I mean, I like pink, but not this time.

I really like the street wisdom of Loesje that adorns Dutch cities with posters of witty wisdom in Dutch and every now and again in English. However, their English is very often Dunglish, maybe even on purpose, but I have a feeling that they don’t realize their English is wrong. I can imagine this adds to the humour for the Dutch, but I think it’s kind of sloppy and takes away from the joke. Again, love you guys, but you really should get some native help or cut the English out altogether.

“If only a microcredit generated (caused?) a microcrisis”. Even corrected it doesn’t have any punch.

“If only microcredits generated (caused?) microcrises”. That’s just plain ugly.

That’s a lot of mistakes for one wee poster.