Ever encountered an undercover language?

General discussion about learning languages
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Sonjaconjota
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Re: Ever encountered an undercover language?

Postby Sonjaconjota » Sun May 07, 2023 5:37 am

I do book reports for publishing houses in Germany, which means that I get (too little) money for reading a novel, writing a summary and giving my opinion, so that they can decide if it's interesting for them to buy the rights and have the book translated.
It has happened to me twice that they sent me a novel supposedly in Spanish, which I then discovered to be in Brazilian Portuguese and had to refuse because I don't read Portuguese.
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tastyonions
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Re: Ever encountered an undercover language?

Postby tastyonions » Sun May 07, 2023 12:12 pm

Sonjaconjota wrote:I do book reports for publishing houses in Germany, which means that I get (too little) money for reading a novel, writing a summary and giving my opinion, so that they can decide if it's interesting for them to buy the rights and have the book translated.
It has happened to me twice that they sent me a novel supposedly in Spanish, which I then discovered to be in Brazilian Portuguese and had to refuse because I don't read Portuguese.

I've frequently caught Portuguese books "hiding out" in the Spanish section of my local used bookstore. :D
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Re: Ever encountered an undercover language?

Postby garyb » Mon May 08, 2023 2:50 pm

tastyonions wrote:
Sonjaconjota wrote:I do book reports for publishing houses in Germany, which means that I get (too little) money for reading a novel, writing a summary and giving my opinion, so that they can decide if it's interesting for them to buy the rights and have the book translated.
It has happened to me twice that they sent me a novel supposedly in Spanish, which I then discovered to be in Brazilian Portuguese and had to refuse because I don't read Portuguese.

I've frequently caught Portuguese books "hiding out" in the Spanish section of my local used bookstore. :D

Same! It also reminds me of stories I heard from friends who worked in a customer service centre that handles calls and emails from all over Europe, which is one of the major employers of younger people (especially those who know a couple of languages) in my city. The Spanish-speakers apparently got frustrated at the number of emails that colleagues forwarded to them because "they look like Spanish" that were actually in Portuguese :D
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Re: Ever encountered an undercover language?

Postby Ogrim » Mon May 08, 2023 3:56 pm

I once searched to see if Amazon had any e-books in Romansh, and they came up with a lot of suggestions. Unfortunately, all of them were in Romanian. :(
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Re: Ever encountered an undercover language?

Postby seito » Fri May 19, 2023 3:17 pm

leosmith wrote:I was watching Birth of the Dragon on Netflix last night. It's English, but I had the subs turned on for some reason. They would occasionally speak Chinese, and the subs said "speaking Cantonese" whenever that happened, so I just kind of tuned it out. Eventually it dawned on me that I understood what they were saying, meaning the subs should have said "Mandarin". If you like well orchestrated martial arts and historical accuracy I highly discourage you from watching this film.


Reminds me of that scene in Balls of Fury, where the base (belonging to a Chinese villain played by Christopher Walken) is playing a self-destruct message over the PA system. If you have subtitles turned on, the subtitles say something like "(self-destruct warning in Chinese)" but it's actually in Japanese. I've always appreciated that scene for the layers of jokes that only a small part of the audience would get.
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Re: Ever encountered an undercover language?

Postby gsbod » Fri May 19, 2023 4:37 pm

Just over 10 years ago I took a trip to Paris. It was my first trip to France after many years, so I was refreshing my high school French on the go, while having a lot of Japanese in my head as I'd then been studying it quite intensively for 4 years or so. So, I was naturally expecting some language interference.

I took the metro to a station near some Japanese bookshops I wanted to explore. As I was walking out of the metro station, there was a lengthy announcement over the tannoy which made me feel really strange. I thought: "Why is my brain trying to parse this French announcement as if it is Japanese? This is a weird kind of interference I have never heard of..." And then the penny dropped that the announcement actually was in Japanese.
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Re: Ever encountered an undercover language?

Postby sporedandroid » Tue Aug 08, 2023 8:38 pm

Just did today. I was watching this current events video. It had bad audio quality. I assumed it was Hebrew at first because the title was in Hebrew. Couldn’t understand it. When I listened closer it sounded closer to Spanish. Sometimes Hebrew and Spanish sound similar-ish to me from the distance. Still couldn’t understand it. When I actually read the description, I realized it was Greek. No wonder I couldn’t understand it. To make things more confusing, there was no subtitles. How are people supposed to find that video useful? I’m very low on sleep, so that might be why I’m confused about what language I’m listening to.
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