Mexico 2002: ¿Habla español? Part I

Mexico 2002

Photos

Stories, Observations, and Miscellany

¿Habla inglés? Menus and Other Diversions

Our Spanish is far from perfect, of course, but that did not prevent us from getting some chuckles out of the English that we encountered at times. I should note first that many, many people in Mexico speak English to varying degrees, and one of the most surprising things to me has always been how people can learn a foreign language by hook or by crook. Street vendors, kids hawking stuff on the beach, hotel employees — if people have a compelling reason to learn a language, they will, and it's a mystery to me how they do it. But they do, often with impressive results.

We did not stray particularly far from the tourist path on this trip, so we found English everywhere, on signs, on menus, in brochures, wherever. While the English that you encounter on the streets can be very impressive, the English in various tourist-oriented publications often is not. Quite the contrary. It's possible that because of my job I might be more sensitive than the average tourist to issues of style and vocabulary. Even so, Erica and I asked ourselves the same question dozen times while reading something in English during the trip: how hard would it be to find a native English speaker to do a little reality check on a translation?

The most consistent source of amusement was menus. Granted, a local restaurant is not going to invest a fortune in translating their specialties for the tourist trade, since it's unlikely to increase their Zagat rating. ;-) But we did get the distinct impression that someone with a year or two of formal English sat down with a dictionary, looked up words, and wrote down whatever might have been listed first.

An example that required a moment of thinking was a dish that in Spanish was listed as ... con carne de res. In English, this was rendered as "... with meat of head of cattle." Cow head? How appetizing is that? But no; all they meant was "beef." Get it? Head of cattle. As in, on the ranch. Sometimes the problem was a simple one of spelling. A dish that in Spanish was listed as "... con pasta" came out of the English mangler as "... with noddies." Some poor typesetter must have had trouble with the handwriting of the person who was trying to convey "noodles." Similarly, one of the tourist shops in Oaxaca had a sign touting their many offerings, among them "Regional Drees."

A more practical problem for us was dealing with menu descriptions of regional dishes. Erica was curious about a local dish in Oaxaca called a tlayuda. On the Spanish menu, one restaurant offered Tlayuda con carne. In English? Tlayuda with meat. Uh ... gee, thanks. We did have the advantage of being able to ask the servers about individual dishes, but that wasn't always necessarily very helpful either. "A tortilla with beans, cheese, and meat." What about this other one? Well, that one is ... "a tortilla with beans and meat, in sauce." This one? "A tortilla with sauce ...". Better to let one's taste buds do the walking, as it were. And naturally there were a few dishes that, hey, maybe you just don't want to know. One of the best-known regional dishes in Oaxaca is chapulines, which you can get in different sizes and served various ways — perhaps with guacamole. What is it, you ask? Grasshoppers roasted on an open fire. We did not indulge.

It isn't fair, naturally, to chide people in another country for not mastering your language. After all, if we were in the inverse situation, how many of us could produce elegant Spanish (or Japanese or French) to accommodate visitors from other countries? Or for that matter, I'm sure that if I went to one of my favorite restaurants and requested a menu in Spanish, the results, if available at all, might well be a visitor's amusement for the day. But funny is funny, fair or not, and I still like that "meat of head of cattle."

The real surprise came at an unexpected place, which I was impressed enough to take a picture of. This was at the Mexico City airport.