I think this highlights some differences between now and the 19th century.
Global communication and travel, to say nothing of media consumption, is much easier today. Many more Portuguese or Brazilian people have easy access to English. But back then, someone who didn't even speak English could publish this phrase book and appear credible.
Allegedly this inspired the Monty Python sketch about the Hungarian-English phrase book.
Omnibus Podcast (Ken Jennings and John Roderick) did a good episode about it as well:
Related:
English as She Is Spoke - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25784683 - Jan 2021 (129 comments)
One of my Iranian colleagues back when I worked in an office had many entertaining phrases, like:
"I go make some shoppings"
"Time for go"
Naturally, the rest of the gang picked them up and used them. I still say them to the consternation of others.
Heaven forbid I disagree with Mark Twain, but star war: backstroke of the west[0] is another great example in this uh genre.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170115091456/http://winterson....
From the Wikipedia:
> O novo guia da conversação em portuguez e inglez, commonly known by the name English as She Is Spoke, is a 19th-century book written by Pedro Carolino, with some editions crediting José da Fonseca as a co-author. It was intended as a Portuguese–English conversational guide or phrase book. However, because the "English" translations provided are usually inaccurate or unidiomatic, it is regarded as a classic source of unintentional humour in translation.
> The humour largely arises from Carolino's indiscriminate use of literal translation, which has led to many idiomatic expressions being translated ineptly. For example, Carolino translates the Portuguese phrase chover a cântaros as "raining in jars", when an analogous English idiom is available in the form of "raining buckets".
> It is widely believed that Carolino could not speak English and that a French–English dictionary was used to translate an earlier Portuguese–French phrase book, …
My favorite mistranslation came from the first time the Olympics were in China. One of the food vendors hung up a banner "401 Not Found".
On Standard Ebooks with an appropriate cover image:
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/pedro-carolino_jose-da-fon...
The Idiotisms and Proverbs section is one of the more hilarious and I wonder how many of them can be mapped back to originals. The only one I could trace is A horse baared don't look him the tooth, which presumably maps back to Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Probably quite a few of them are no longer common in English either by now, which makes computing the inverse harder.
A cartoon I saw years ago shows two men sitting at a table in a café. There's a book or two on the table. One says to the other: "Why you be not happy with me as translator of books by you?"
I am reading a book on fuzzy logic that was translated from Japanese. The translation is quite bad and difficult to read. At one point it was talking about calculus and mentioned Newton and "Ripunitz". It took me a minute to work out what I was reading:
Leibniz -> ライプニッツ (ripunittsu) -> Ripunitz
I first read about this in Stephen Pile's The Book of Heroic Failures. He seemed particular taken with the phrase "To craunch a mamoset".
> it has been reserved to our own time for a soi-disant instructor to perpetrate—at his own expense—the monstrous joke of publishing a Guide to Conversation in a language of which it is only too evident that every word is utterly strange to him.
Times aren't that different!
Definitely a classic.
Some friends and I used to use "spits in the coat" to express the superiority of one thing over another, e.g.
"Framework 1 spits in the coat of Framework 2". "Sports Team 1 spits in the coat of Sports Team 2."
Galactic Pot Healer by Philip K. Dick has some examples of this too
What's remarkable is how good machine translation (DeepL, Google Translate) has become at handling idiomatic expressions in recent years. Still not perfect, of course (there's still the odd clanger), but anyone trying to do the same task today would fare considerably better.
This book is featured in The Book of Heroic Failures, which has made me cry with laughter since I was a child. Delighted to discover that it's real
My postilion has been struck by lightning
Feed this into ChatGPT
The scanned copy of the book at Internet Archive [0] is probably a better representation of this text than the pdf made from a Word document that the title links to.
[0] - https://archive.org/details/englishassheissp00applrich/page/...