At the risk of being patronising towards someone using English as a foreign language, to my mind the best thing is the text accompanying the cartoon story: "The piteous woman is disturbed. A sweet dreaming is broken. She is feckless in the hospital". For some reason I find that utterly charming.
My favourite Portugese to English phrasebook of all time, incidentally, is English As She Is Spoke, which I learned of in Stephen Pile's book, The Book of Heroic Failures, where he comments: "Is there anything in conventional English which could equal the vividness of 'to craunch a marmoset'?"
Piteous and feckless are fairly uncommon words in English as well. Speaking a foreign language, I know there are some books that offer some... odd translations to words that are hardly ever used in that language anymore. I would guess this person learned English from an older book teaching proper English.
