Misspeaks in another language

The bridging of a language barrier provides continued comedic relief. Here are some of the stories shared by friends and colleagues:

After language class one day, a volunteer made friends with a local man named Tsetsi. They made plans to get together and play soccer soon. The volunteer returned to his host family, excited to tell his Baba about his new friend. Using the broken Bulgarian phrases he knew, he told her that he liked his new friend, was excited to see him soon, and hoped to see a lot of him. His Baba couldn’t seem to understand what he was talking about and was getting distressed so the volunteer tried repeating again. It was unsuccessful, his Baba seemed very concerned, and the volunteer gave up and went to his room. Well… the volunteer had been saying Tsitsi instead of Tsetsi. Tsetsi is a name; Tsitsi means breasts. He’d been emphatically repeating how much he liked breasts, was excited to see them, and wanted to play with them. The volunteer, of course, didn’t realize this until the following day in language class when our trainer informed him of a call he’d received from the Baba. She was quite concerned that this young American boy, who had only been in the village a few weeks, had met breasts and wanted to spend time with breasts and see them often.

One of the Bulgarian colleagues recently returned from a three-week trip to America with representatives from 20 different countries to learn about local governance stateside. Meetings were held in English. During one of the debriefing discussions, a participant was comparing a local election in the U.S. to one that was coming up in his home village. He began by saying, “we have a very big erection coming up soon…” He continued to talk about the large erection and its enormous potential. Only one letter off, but the meaning was, I’d assume, completely distorted.

The Bulgarian word for shower is pronounced ‘doosh.’ Most of our host families don’t speak English and our Bulgarian, when we arrived, at our host families was limited to yes, no, thank you, hello. The first night, when they kept pointing to the bathroom and asking “Doosh? You want? You need? Doosh?” was very confusing.