Still Lost in Translation: More misadventures in English abroad - Hardcover

Croker, Charlie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1905211163 ISBN 13: 9781905211166

Publisher: Random House Books, 2007

Synopsis

Have you ever arrived in a hotel room and been baffled by the information provided?

Beware of your luggage.

In your room you will find a minibar which is filled with alcoholics.

Do not throw urine around.

Have you ever been to a restaurant and wondered what on earth to order?

Bored Meat Stew

Lorry Driver Soup

Kiss Lorraine

Have you ever arrived in an airport and found that the supposedly helpful signs just make you feel more lost?

You are required to declare all sorts of private things.

Departure. Bus stop. Car rectal.

Please buy your ticket consciously.

Charlie Croker has, and in 2006 he gathered together what he thought was the definitive collection of English language howlers for his bestselling book Lost in Translation. But he reckoned without the great British public. Not only was the book a smash hit, it also opened the floodgates to a deluge of emails and letters stuffed full of further mistranslations and mutilated phrases. From a leaflet from the Museum of Rasputin in Russia (which is apparently situated in a house that belonged a pilot fish Zubov) to a song title on a pirated Pink Floyd CD (Come Fartably Numb), the scrambled sentences just kept flooding in. At the same time Charlie has continued his travels and picked up gems of his own. With such a wealth of material, a sequel wasn't just a necessity, it was a public service, and Still Lost in Translation is even more addictive, whimsical and side-splittingly hilarious than the first book.

About this title

Review:

Subtitled More Misadventures in English Abroad, Still Lost in Translation is an absolutely hilarious compendium of fractured English drawn from a wide variety of sources by Charlie Croker. These wonderful howlers can be found throughout the world, and most of us can quote (with some relish) favourites of our own. But can they match the wonderful signs such as that to be found at a skiing cable station in China? ‘Refuse the person without ticket or drinking excessively, and the person with hypertension, heart disease, neuropathy and simpleton to get on the lift.’ Or a leaflet at a sporting event in pre-democracy Hungary: ‘Sports in the rotting capitalist countries are the declared enemy of the Socialist Athletes who consider it their duty to worth the superiority of the Socialist races’. But it isn't just communist countries that come up with these cherishable manglings of the language: from menus in various countries, we are tempted with ‘corrugated iron beef’, ‘sad-faced cod’, ‘pee soup’ and ‘ice cream with rubber chocolate’. Some of the most entertainingly puzzling instructions recorded here really have one scratching one’s head, such as the following written on a computer components box in the Far East: ‘Please no plummet’.

A book as diverting as this, however, should come with a warning: you won’t be able to resist quoting page after page to your nearest and dearest -- exactly as has happened in this review. Charlie Croker, who wrote the similarly entertaining The Little Book of Beckham also compiled the first book in this series, Lost in Translation -- which is equally quotable. --Barry Forshaw

Review:

a delicious concoction of mangled English
-- Wanderlust November 2007

many giggle-making boo-boos -- Spectator 1 December 2007

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1905211163
• ISBN 13: 9781905211166
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176