Pink Dog

Sometimes the foreign version of a phrase is rather more fun…

Item one:

“Not my problem” in Polish is “nie moj cyrk, nie moje malpy.” Literally “not my circus, not my monkey”. (Hat-tip: Howard Tayler)

Item two:

“Silly season”, as in the summer period when the media loves frivolous stories even more than the rest of the time, is called sauregurkenzeit in German, which translates as “pickled cucumber season”. (Hat-tip: Wikipedia)

Any favourites of yours to add? The comments section awaits…

6 responses to “Sometimes the foreign version of a phrase is rather more fun…”

  1. The Finnish equivalent of “beating about the bush” translates as “As a cat circles a bowl of hot porridge”. I’m afraid I can’t remember the whole thing in Finnish and can’t find it online: it alliterates strongly with K.

    Mind you, English is full of such phrases which we use without realising how comical they may seem to foreigners. “From the horse’s mouth”, “throwing the baby out with the bath-water”, “like you’ve gone through a hedge backwards”, “going down like a lead balloon” or recent coinages like Chelsea tractor.

  2. How about some Dutch? “Now it becomes clear” is “Nu komt de aap uit de mouw”, lit. “Now the monkey comes out of the sleeve”.

    The Dutch version of “taste of your own medicine” is quite good too – you “give someone a cookie from their own dough”.

  3. ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’ in French is, ‘It’s raining strings’ (il pleut des cordes), a rare occasion when that nation is more literal than us. Where we say ‘I’ve got a frog in my throat’ they say they’ve got a cat in their throat (j’ai un chat à la gorge). And they don’t have en-suite bathrooms. Well they do, but they don’t call them that, to their amusement when they visit the UK.

  4. When I was learning French at school, many years ago, we were told that a term of endearment for a young child was ‘mon p’tit chou’ – my little cabbage. I’ve no reason to believe that it wasn’t true.

  5. The German equivalent of he drives me up the wall is “Er bringt mir auf die Palme” (apologies for grammar), he takes me up the palm tree…

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