Idioms in foreign languages - and their translations

Welcome to a2k Mateusek

I particularly liked




Most appropriate for Prince Philip (husband of Queen Elizabeth) who is always "saying something stupid and in a hurry"

Can you give me some phonetic pronounciation of the Polish so I can use the expression

Many thanks

weeskochitz yak Filip zkonopee
(funny how it starts with 'wee' and ends with 'pee')

Many thanks Dag, phoned Buckingham Palace immediately on getting your post... but she'd already heard it. (Thought it funny though, aparantly its a family joke thing with the Windsors- sorry the Saxe Coburg Gothas)

Dag not entirely like that I suppose.

I'll give the English phonenetic pronunciation

viskotszitz yak Filip s konopee

Dag it cannot start with 'w' it must start with 'v'.

ooh somebody else from Poland:D now I'm not alone ;]
Witam Cię

I'm looking for a particular Polish phrase, it was something my father told me once, that he had learned from his parents. I don't remember what it was, but it was something to the effect of "you're the only one who laughs at your jokes". If anyone could help me out with that, it would be much appreciated.

Welcome to A2K, cheeseofnazareth!

I've actually no knowledge of Polish at all and can only understand some Jiddish (Yiddish).

However, perhaps a proverb on this site may sound familiar?

Blessed are the cheesemakers?

I wonder if that film played in Alabama

Morning all.

Guid morn, McTag.

(Why do I think, St. County could need a new manager, like McBertie? )

We have a saying in Britain "San fairy ann" which means "it doesn't matter one way or the other"


When the British Tommy arrived in France to fight in the First World War, he was presented with a language he struggled to make sense of. What he did to the pronunciation of French and Belgian place names is a wonder, such as turning Ypres into Wipers. He picked up a lot of French expressions, but he changed them into something that sounded English. This was the fate of ça ne fait rien, "it does not matter",

Just a small correction.

The Portuguese 'Matar Dois Cohelhos Com Um Tacada Só'

Rabbit is 'Coelho' (1 'h')...I caught that bc of the familiarity of the last name of the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho.

I like 'Vai ver se eu estou na esquina,' it means 'get lost' or literally, 'go see if I am on the street corner'

Love that last one, doido. Welcome to A2K.

Well it's taken me about 2h to read all of that (i was doing my German hwk ... honest!! ) And brilliant the only German idiom i could think of wasn't in there!!

Ok in English we say "out of the frying pan, into the fire" - i.e. out of one bad situation into an even worse one

In German there's an equivalent but i'm afraid to say i can't precisely remember it - it's something along the lines of out of the rain, into the watertrough...

vom Regen in die Traufen kommen

Da kommt man vom Regen in die Traufe. // Vom Regen in die Traufe kommen.

'Traufe' means "eaves" :wink:

How the hell did I miss this thread!? I have to go back and look through it for all the italian ones...

Vom Regen in die Traufe kommen - wouldn't it be
the equivalent to: "When it rains it poors" ? I mean the
meaning of it, not the exact translation german to english.

"Out of the frying pan, into the fire", in English.

"Della padella al fuoco", in Italian.

"De la sartén al fuego", in Spanish.

In Dutch: "van de regen in de drup" (from the rain into the drip)

In Slovak: "z dažďa pod odkvap"
- "from the rain under a downspout (gutter?)"

Russian contains any number of things leftover from medieval times, which has to sound funny to an American whose entire culture started in the 1600s or thereabouts.

I raised my hand once upon hearing something like "A tui menya NAKARKAL", meaning "you jinxed me!", or brought me bad luck, and asked something like "schto eto takoye, eto ne mozhet buit normalnij russkij glagol...", or what the hell was that, I mean that can't possibly be any sort of normal Russian verb.

The prof explained that the idea of 'jinx' was originally indistinguishable from the idea of 'curse', and that a human cannot pronounce a curse so that a wizard ('volshyebnik') intent on laying a curse on somebody would ordinarily have his raven pronounce the curse for him.

Thus the Russian verb 'karkats/nakarkats' is basically just crow/raven talk (caw, caw...).

A friend once asked me the difference between a crow and a raven and I explained that it was like the masons and the shriners, i.e. that you had to be a crow for six or eight years before they'd LET you be a raven...