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Showing posts with the label colloqualism

Part 2 of Cross-cultural communication conundrums (conundra)

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Thank you for your patience, dear readers: here's the awaited English interpretation of the Hiberno-English example I gave in my earlier post , for those who didn't try going to places like the Irish slang dictionary site to look things up: " Oh be the hokie : my laptop was banjaxed . I felt so knackered after trying to fix it that when I met yer wan on the footpath by Mssrs ., I could barely say  how'ya ." " For goodness' sake : my laptop was severely damaged . I felt so exhausted after trying to fix it that when I met that human female (of any age) whose name I've forgotten on the sidewalk by my local pub (you know where it is) , I could barely greet her ."  Actually, the interjection  (which could also be interpreted as "for crying out loud" etc.) wasn't something heard frequently, and is from a prior generation. As well, footpath is arguably UK in origin. I noticed also from the dictionary site I found, that UK Eng

Part 1 of Cross-cultural communication conundrums ("It's a slam dunk!")

A US-based colleague of mine whom I'd had the recent pleasure to meet, spoke to my immediate team about working effectively across various cultures. The basketball expression "it's a slam dunk!" was, in his experience, as bewildering to his overseas colleagues as what we might consider to be less esoteric expressions, like "no kidding". This prompted me to consider what lessons I'd learned in my position as a thrice ex-patriated person with a working knowledge of Japanese and French (and now challenged with Austrian German). In Ireland, it took me a surprisingly long time to truly understand Hiberno-English. Never mind the phonetic shifts (aka "accent"); even transcribed, common interjections and vocabulary can quickly mystify the non-initiated. Take this example sentence which artificially conflates a lot of native (Dublin centric) expressions: "Oh be the hokie: my laptop was banjaxed. I felt so knackered after trying