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My neighbor, an elderly woman from Austria, speaks mostly in German.
We share a gardener, who speaks only Spanish.
Since she’s home during the day, I tell her in my halting German that I want
the gardener to trim the shrubs.
She then finds the word for shrubs and tells the gardener.
Most weeks, I come home and find that the roses have been pruned,
but the shrubs are as unruly as ever.
Chalk it up to being monolingual, but we all get an E for effort.
Now I’ve discovered a better way to communicate with my neighbor,
and she’s excited about giving the gardener more precise instructions.
The better way is called Multilingual Deluxe Dictionary, a CD for Windows
that helps us translate common words into six five other languages
(including English as the king of England speaks it; Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Italian).
So, I tell my neighbor that I don’t want the “gras” cut next week.
She then tells the gardener not to cut the the “hierba.”
And, voila, the grass gets cut, but the shrubs still look like the audience in a punk rock concert.
No one ever said language is an exact science.
You search for words either from the entire directory or by category
(agricultural, including food; business, transportation, science, society and military).
The dictionary is quite complete, but I couldn’t find “shrub” in any of the categories,
which explains why they’re never trimmed.
“Multilingual Dictionary Deluxe” will run on Windows Vista, XP, Me, 2000 and 98.
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