When I think of phrasebooks I think of Monty Python's Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook[1] sketch[2].
I've never been able to bring myself to trust them since first seeing it. :P
It's pretty commonly known but this sketch has some inspiration from a real life phrase book "English as she is spoke". It was written by someone who did not speak English who used a Portugese->French and then a French->English dictionary to produce the phrasebook. Complete unintentional and amazing humor. In line with another great double translation masterpiece "Backstroke of the West"
It's an amazing read. You can find it free online.
>Mark Twain said of English as She Is Spoke "Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect."
>Stephen Pile mentions this work in The Book of Heroic Failures and comments: "Is there anything in conventional English which could equal the vividness of 'to craunch a marmoset'?"[7] The original has "to craunch the marmoset", an entry under the book's "Idiotisms and Proverbs". This is the author's attempt to translate the French slang idiomatic expression croquer le marmot, used to indicate "waiting patiently for someone to open a door",[8] with croquer referring to the "knocking" or "rapping" sound, and marmot, a term for the grotesque door knockers in vogue at the time.
I remember using phrasebooks in the early 2000s in Europe. They were better than nothing, but never as useful as you hoped. If you were totally new to a language and didn't know any phrases, they best you could hope for was to point out a phrase in the book to someone as a way to communicate. And even if you managed to say something intelligible, you'd have no idea what the other person's response meant.
They mentioned it in the article, but these days the Google Translate app completely replaces that role. I've had complex interactions (work, baby sitters, house cleaners, repairs, etc) with people who spoke zero English through Google Translate's interactive translation mode across multiple languages and it works amazingly well.
On the other hand, I have a lot of funny memories about phrase books and things going wildly wrong. So I guess we will miss out those stories in the future.
A common problem was they got the level of formality wrong.
I had a Portuguese one which translated “hi” to the equivalent of “Good day, Sir”. While a Polish one translated “great, thanks” to “fucking brilliant!”.
Sounds like Polish people contributing to the training corpus are simply happier than the Portuguese contributor population, who perhaps also lived 100 years prior...
I think Google Translate is still struggling with Thai language as I often get a lot of funny looks when I translate something into Thai and the English I get back sounds like a strange poem.
Example: in my favorite coffee shop and the barista asks to use my phone to translate something. The English that comes out is "Drugs are high in the mountains"
But maybe that was what he was actually trying to say, as that does seem appropriate for Thailand... However I was not inquiring about drugs, and when I was confused and translated just "drugs" he vehemently denied talking about that.
≥ I have a lot of funny memories about phrase books and things going wildly wrong
Exactly this! Phrase books give you just enough of the language to get into trouble, but never enough to get you out of it. Like third-year Spanish students on a class trip to Mexico.
> I remember using phrasebooks in the early 2000s in Europe. They were better than nothing, but never as useful as you hoped.
I had the opposite experience. I found the phrase books to be by far the best way to get by, because I didn’t have to worry too much about conjugation, word genders, and so on. One of them was the way I bootstrapped my way into speaking Polish with a girlfriend who spoke no English.
I went to a conference in Japan two weeks ago and before I travelled I got a Lonely Planet phrasebook from a used book store.
I did end up using Google Translate on my smartphone more, but having a physical book that obviously marks you as someone learning the language is a useful and underrated benefit. I had 2-3 conversations ('interactions' is probably a better word for me actually using the Japanese) over the course of a week that I can attribute to the phrasebook, which is somewhat significant because at the conference English was the default.
Also if the phrasebook is well organized, it can be a good scaffold for keeping the language organized in memory, so it can be a kind of a bridge between a simple translation lookup and a textbook. It's also like a fanny pack that has some retro appeal. Although the phrasebook had a dictionary at the back, it wasn't that useful. Having a proper dedicated pocket dictionary was good because it had words listed with phrase collocations/examples.
monty python, but even better: three men on the bummel. The second half of chapter 3 begins:
He handed me a small book bound in red cloth. It was a guide to English conversation for the use of German travellers. It commenced “On a Steam-boat,” and terminated “At the Doctor’s”; its longest chapter being devoted to conversation in a railway carriage, among, apparently, a compartment load of quarrelsome and ill-mannered lunatics: “Can you not get further away from me, sir?”—“It is impossible, madam; my neighbour, here, is very stout”—“Shall we not endeavour to arrange our legs?”—“Please have the goodness to keep your elbows down”—“Pray do not inconvenience yourself, madam, if my shoulder is of any accommodation to you,” whether intended to be said sarcastically or not, there was nothing to indicate—“I really must request you to move a little, madam, I can hardly breathe,” the author’s idea being, presumably, that by this time the whole party was mixed up together on the floor. The chapter concluded with the phrase, “Here we are at our destination, God be thanked! (Gott sei dank!)” a pious exclamation, which under the circumstances must have taken the form of a chorus.
I've never used phrasebooks much; "thank you" and "Excuse me, I don't speak <their language>, do you speak English?" were quite sufficient. "Where is the toilet?" is also essential.
But something that was very useful in Paris was the menu translator book, thin enough to carry in your back pocket. I could stand outside and look at their menu, and almost all the food was listed in the book, which had chapters for meats, vegetables, dessert, etc. Then when I went inside I knew what I wanted.
I don't doubt there are better apps now, but I can imagine a specialized product like this still being handy.
Reminds me of a time years ago, I had just arrived in China, had an unexpected overnight stay in a remot-ish city with my wife/kids, none of us could (yet) speak/read any Chinese, and the restaurant menu had no pictures (and of course no one spoke a word of English). This was pre-phone apps and we didn't have a phrasebook or pocket dictionary on us (can't remember why we didn't at least have that). We randomly pointed to words on the page and awaited the results. A whole group of waiters came over to our table to see, and there was lots of laughter from both sides. I can't actually remember what we ate, but I do recall we left untouched a few things that looked highly dubious in content.
>I had just arrived in China, had an unexpected overnight stay in a remot-ish city with my wife/kids, none of us could (yet) speak/read any Chinese, and the restaurant menu had no pictures (and of course no one spoke a word of English).
That was always a favorite of mine. Walk into a restaurant in (NYC's) chinatown where there were only Asian folks and no English menus.
I'd usually just point at something someone else was eating. It was almost always glorious. :)
I was just in Colombia, and now you can use Google Lens on Android to translate posters and menus. It misses a lot but is "good enough" and you can even download languages for use offline.
Literally translating a menu, as Google Lens would do, isn't always helpful, though. Many dishes have names which are metaphorical (like "pasta primavera" or "drunken noodles"), or which allude to the origin of a dish (like "beef Stroganoff" or "Cuban sandwich"). Simply knowing what the words mean doesn't necessarily help you understand what you're going to be eating -- a guide like the one AlbertCory is describing can expand those words to more useful descriptions.
Turned out to be particularly bad in Israel. One of the first things I learned using a phone translator app was that the restaurant is mostly offering variants of "damned hummus".
With machine translation, it's obvious why phrasebooks aren't popular anymore. But when I'm learning a new language, I do find it helpful to have a list of common phrases to study. While machine translation can help you with literal translations of things you want to say, you can't have high confidence that the translations are the most idiomatic way to express common things. Phrasebooks can help you with that.
For example, in Hungarian, the literal translation of "Hi, how are you?" is "Szia, hogy vagy?", but you would almost never say that when greeting someone. Instead you would say, "Szia, jó napot!", which means "Hi, (I wish you a) good day!". If you ask a Hungarian how they are doing without any context you're probably going to put them off.
Somewhere around here I have, or possibly I gave to my weird uncle years ago, a copy of "the worst-case scenario survival handbook", which has mostly-genuine advice for all sorts of interesting situations like how to stop a runaway car, how to stop a runaway camel, how to survive an avalanche, etc.
In the back is a phrasebook, with a few dozen common phrases translated into a handful of potentially-useful languages. It includes such gems as "I am sorry, I did not mean to offend you", "please take me to a hospital", "why is the water brown", "where is the embassy", and the last phrase is "you will never take me alive".
My Italian phrasebook, printed much more recently than yours, has words and phrases for things one might say during sex. I've often wondered if I'm expected to remember in the heat of the moment, or if I'm allowed a quick glance.
Now I'm imagining a comedy sketch in which two people who insist on trying to speak the other's language while out on a date end up in bed, but both with their noses in phrasebooks.
Yeah, I have a couple of phrase books that have an entire section of negotiating your way through an entire hookup, with phrases at the end like, “I have an early flight”.
There's a bit of the Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook alive in E2's phrasebooks. The Parisian French and Quebec French translations have a rather different character from each other, for example...
In the late 1980s I recall picking up a phrasebook for some southeast Asian language (Burmese, perhaps?) and seeing this cringeworthy phrase:
"Muster the coolies by the bungalow."
The main problem with phrasebooks is that you often can't make intelligible sounds in a language you don't know because you don't have the vowels, consonants, or tones. On the other hand, phrasebooks provide a useful springboard for use by immersed extroverts to communicate with, then be corrected by native speakers.
When we're first learning our native languages, we're basically using a phrasebook that consists of set single- and double-word commands and statements. By learning how to vary and add stuff to those set phrases, we leverage ourselves into fluency.
Does anyone know of any good translation apps that also help facilitate learning?
One problem I face is that I use translator apps to converse with some family and (mutual) friends and don’t share common language, but when I translate a whole sentence or paragraph for example it’s hard for me to learn the meaning without typing each individual word/phrase individually which is tedious, and breaks the flow when we are conversing. Furthermore it would be nice to be able to keep a record of the conversations (which often take place in person) and I would like to be able to go back and sort of be able to practice the phrases and conversations I had in the past. Mostly just english/french and english/spanish would do for me but other languages would be cool too.
The author assumes that these phrases portending doom ("they have cut off his arm"/"after he vomited his constipation was relieved") suggest something about people's attitude to foreign cultures. I think it's worth bearing in mind that it probably says more about their [largely British] senses of humour.
When I think of phrasebooks I think of Monty Python's Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook[1] sketch[2]. I've never been able to bring myself to trust them since first seeing it. :P
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_Hungarian_Phrasebook
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1Sw0PDgHU4