Merry mix-ups when you think local, speak global

Western people don't seem to bother so much about kinship. In Italian, a single word, "nipote", is used for grandson, granddaughter, nephew and niece (except the gender morphology), indicating a similar relationship with these children irrespective of whether you are their grandparents or their uncle/aunt.

Sometimes, apparently similar expressions are quite different. The Chinese proverb "tianxia wuya yiban hei" (all crows are dark in the world) may sound close to the French idiom "La nuit tous les chats sont gris" (At night all cats are grey). But the first means that villains are bad everywhere in the world; while the second says that in the dark, individual features disappear.

Not only confusing, words can also be traitors. On a hotel room door in Spain, a card read "No molestar" (Do not disturb). It made me smile because in French, "molester" means "rough up", while in English, it means "to sexually assault".

Same for tailors offering "alterations" on clothes. No French speaker would dare to go there, as altration strictly means "deterioration". Once, in New-Brunswick, Canada, I saw a bilingual sign: "Do not trespass" and "Ne pas trpasser". The French sentence means "Do not die"!

A Chinese student once told me, in French, that he had "pass son examen". When I asked whether he has succeeded, he was confused that I should ask. In Chinese and English, "tongguo kaoshi" (pass an exam) means to succeed in an exam. But in French, "passer" means "to take", while "russir" is "to pass".

A Spanish pregnant woman is embarazata (embarrassed). When a Chinese is embarrassed, he or she laughs - which is a natural body language in the culture - but laughing at the person whose question one can't answer is a very impolite reaction in Latin cultures.

You see, language is not always communication.

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