Here’s another English word that can mean the exactly opposite depending on the context:
“We will charge your account” means “we will take money from your account”.
“We will charge your battery”, on the other hand, means that we will add some juice to your battery.
In Danish there are two different words for this: “opkræve” is what we do to your money and “oplade” is what we do to your battery. If you enter “charge the account” into Google Translate you will get the incorrect word.
”The customer reviews his purchases, then pays” was translated using the other meaning of “review” (i.e. like a movie review) : “kunden anmelder”…
The correct translation would be “kunden gennemgår” or “kunden gennemser”.
The English words “Custom number” were meant to refer to the ability of the customer to put his own custom, internal (identification) numbers inside a PayPal invoice. Without the whole context the translations came out as “Customer Number” and “Customs Number”. And strangely enough, “customary number” is the exact opposite of “custom number”… One has to get accustomed… 😉
In Danish:
Custom number ==> Tilpasset nummer
Customer number ==> Kundenummer
Customs number ==> Toldnummer
Customary number ==> Sædvanlige nummer
The original English sentence was:
“When you receive an upgrade notification on your mobile device, install it immediately. With every upgrade, providers are closing security gaps which can make your device more vulnerable to security breaches.”
It sounds to me as if the upgrades are making the device more vulnerable to security breaches!
A better formulated English for the purpose of internationalization (and common understanding) probably could have read something like this:
“When you receive an upgrade notification on your mobile device, install it immediately. With every upgrade, providers are closing security gaps. Not-closed security gaps make your device vulnerable to security breaches.”
This puts the security breaches in the past. I translated into Danish accordingly, although in Danish we benefit from the fact that we have two different words, “som” and “hvilket”, depending on whether “which” refers to the noun before (“som”) or to the whole sentence before (“hvilket”). In English language that is accomplished by the far more subtle comma before the word “which”: if it’s there, we are referring to the whole preceding sentence, if it’s NOT there, then “which” just refers to the previous word. Who knew? So, in fact, the first quoted English sentence is abolutely correct, as the word “which” (without a comma) refers to the word before it, i.e. “security gaps”. The security gaps are the ones “making your device vulnerable to security breaches”, -and not the “every upgrade” of the previous sentence.
And if you now do know, try to avoid using it that way, because it’s almost guaranteed to get lost in translation.
You can read more about the English rules for “comma before Which” at: http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/ask-teacher/73947-using-comma-before.html
The name for this blog, “Rotten Danish”, was the brain child of my colleague, friend and ping-pong sensei Erwin Hom and was chosen of course partly because of my Danish affinities, as most of the posts in this blog will be from my professional life as Danish Linguist, but also the beauty of “Rotten Danish” is in all the ways in which these two words can be ambigous, understood or misunderstood:
Is it a Hamlet reference (“There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark…”)?
Is it talking about the Danish soccer players who beat my favorite team?
Are we talking about the Grauballe Man, the 2000 years old mummified body of an Iron Age Dane found in a peat bog in 1953? That’s quite a rotten Dane, indeed…
Or are we referring to some baked goods, danishes, going bad?
Or is there a live rat involved some place?
Yes! Only two words, and so many possibilities… Enjoy. And join the conversation.
“Postpaid” (as opposed to Prepaid) was mistaken for “portofrit” (free shipment) in Danish. The correct translation would be “efterbetalt”, quite different.
Free shipment is “Postage paid” in English.
The English sentence “Our product is a great value” (meaning: is a bargain), gets translated to “Vores produkt har stor værdi” (Our product is worth a lot, i.e. more or less: is expensive), which makes me notice how we some times in English use a word totally opposite of its original meaning.
The current slang use of “sick” as meaning something GOOD comes to mind, or “downhill from here”, which is good if you’re on a bicycle, but bad if you’re turning 50 years old.
There are more examples of such words, which can mean the exactly opposite depending on context, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym