I've posted once before about imported products and the text contained, the translation to English being the basic point. Often, the translation comes across as odd, especially considering the backward nature of our language, wood, would, thought, tough, dough, cough, sell, sale, sail, two, to, too. I won't even mention our random word additions from around the world that we now call English.
Here again, one of these items is a gift, a lovely gift from Italy of a bottle of crema de limoni, a lemon cream liqueur. Sadly, the bottle is rather small, but happily, it's a cool bottle to add to our collection of more stuff that's pretty and unnecessary.
AltaVista's Babel Fish translator tells me that "L'abuso di alcool nuoce alla salute" translates from Italian to English as "The alcool abuse nuoce to the health." Okay, alcool is obviously alcohol, and nuoce? Not sure. I tried to translate it by itself and got nuoce.
On the box that held the bottle, the text is almost entirely in Italian. In addition to the warning, it does tell us both "si serve freddo" as well as "to be served cold" and even "il se sert froid" for their French buyers.
What I like is the box's translation into English of the health warning, "To drink to excess damage health." It's almost advice, I think.
My friend that brought me this delightful beverage refers to it as lemonchello. She is an awesome friend. Should you ever find yourself near a bottle of this delightful stuff, you ought to grab it and go.
Our next item of the night is the paper wrapper from a pair of chopsticks. Momma and I went out without the boys. We went barhopping and appetizer eating. We had an absolute blast.
Here is the text in question from the wrapper. Believe me, I've read it a couple of times to make sure that I've misspelled properly and added the proper capital letters.
Welcome to Chinese Restaurant.
please try your Nice Chinese Food With Chopsticks the traditional and typical of Chinese glonous history and cultual.
BAMBOO CHOPSTLCKS PRODUCT OF CHINA
I'm assuming that cultual and chopstlcks are just misspellings. But glonous is a bit more open. My first guess would be that it should say glorious. But maybe it's just some crazy word added because some guy was tired and just not trying that hard one day. Maybe they also used Alta Vista and nuoce came back translated into glonous.
Mostly, I just love the welcome and the request that I enjoy my nice Chinese food and that I use chopsticks. We did enjoy our food, pot stickers and egg rolls there, some sort of duck breast thing and insanely large pieces of calamari at the next place.
I almost forgot that the initial laugh for my wife and me was the word glonous. Maybe we were giddy from being out together on a real date, or perhaps it was the fact that we were giddy from being out together . . .yeah, it seemed funny then.
Glonous-heehee!
