That sits well mustache! 🧔 What is Arnold trying to say? 🤔 Our Language Event 🎤
Welcome to the latest instalment of English and the Dutch, the newsletter with tips and tricks, fun facts, new translations and other good stuff about how Dutch speakers speak English. In your inbox every second Wednesday.
The newsletter is written by me, Heddwen Newton. I also own the website www.hoezegjeinhetEngels.nl. If you are wondering where you signed up for this newsletter, that’s probably where you signed up for this newsletter. And if you have not yet signed up for this newsletter, you can do so right here:
Onze Taal-congres
On Saturday 17 June, I will be manning a table at the Onze Taal-congres in Haarlem. Come say hi!
Did you notice me sneakily not translating the name of the event? That’s because I feel that in English, this kind of thing isn’t a “congress”, but it is not a “conference” either. In the UK, it would be called an “event” or a “show”. A “conference” is for specialists, and a “congress” is a weird-sounding word that isn’t used very much any more, despite the locations often still being called “congress centres”. More here.
By the way, the main purpose of me being there is that I would like more subscribers for this newsletter. So if you would like to do me a favour, you could stand near my table and say very loudly: “Oh, you’re from that newsletter about the English of Dutch people. That newsletter is EXCELLENT. If I weren’t already a subscriber, I would SUBSCRIBE RIGHT NOW. It is JUST SO GOOD.”
Cheers :-)
(Britten zoals ik zeggen “cheers” als ze “dankjewel” bedoelen. Vaak ook, zoals hier “bij voorbaat dank.”)
Quiz
Some typical Dutch mistakes. What is wrong with these sentences?
My mother and her sister are a twin.
I have a great live.
The organisation did a research.
This is thé guide for dining in Amsterdam.
My little man is doing something in the below picture that he shouldn’t be doing in Dutch, or in English. What is the idiom in Dutch? And in English?
Dutch/English in the news
The Guardian writes about bruine kroegen
British newspaper The Guardian reports about the movement in the Netherlands to preserve and protect that poor endangered animal: de bruine kroeg.
Reading time: 4 minutes / The Guardian (UK)
Australian journalist gets hagelslag almost completely wrong
It’s quite endearing, actually, the way this lady went online to try to figure out hagelslag and got the wrong end of the stick. “[the Dutch] have their own version of sprinkles on buttered bread that they serve at parties.” Uhm, no dear. It’s breakfast, it’s lunch, it’s a snack, it’s everything. But unless you are serving lunch at your party, serving bread with hagelslag would be a bit odd. (Though saying that, I’d happily eat it! Perhaps she’s on to something.)
Even funnier, I thought, was this tip:
“(…) tip all your sprinkles into a rectangular container, spread your bread with butter and then press it, buttered side down, into the sprinkles [to avoid a mess].”
What did they get right? They loved the taste! Well done, Australia :-)
Reading time: 3 minutes / news.com.au (Australia)
English Books Are Popular With Dutch Speakers. So What?
Dutch people, young Dutch women especially, are choosing to read books in English rather than Dutch. Perhaps because they feel hip young-adult books are preferable to the stuffy Dutch books they were made to read at school. The numbers are quite striking: in 2012, seven per cent of books sold in the Netherlands were not in Dutch (and mostly in English). In 2022, this was up to 20 per cent. This long-form article from The Low Countries discusses why this is not such bad news for book sellers, but pretty grim news for Dutch writers and translators.
Reading time: 17 minutes / The Low Countries (Netherlands)
Dutch is a tricky language
American-in-Amsterdam Kate Aemisegger writes about her adventures speaking Dutch. In this article, she talks about how she said “ik ga even naar huis”, thinking “even” was a filler word that didn’t mean anything, and “ik snap het helemaal niet” instead of “ik snap het niet helemaal”. She also tries to explain the word “broodje”. Oh Kate, nobody can explain the word “broodje”…
Reading time: 5 minutes / I am Expat (Netherlands)
Recent translations
I post a new article about a difficult-to-translate Dutch word or phrase on my website every day. Here is a selection from the past two weeks.
Dat zit wel snor
Recently, I’ve been tackling the kinds of Dutch expressions that people love translating into English literally for a laugh. I’m often surprised to find that the actual translation isn’t that simple. *That sits well mustache* is one of them. I’ve listed plenty of options, but none of them precisely capture the Dutch meaning. In the end, the one that feels the most right requires a change in the sentence structure, and a slight raise in formality: “Die presentatie zit wel snor.” becomes “I’m feeling confident about that presentation.” More translations here.
De kat uit de boom kijken
*To look the cat out of the tree* is another one of those funny Dutchisms. In this case, I have found translations that fit well, but I’ve noticed they don’t all fit in every context. “To adopt a wait-and-see attitude” usually works, but in Dutch you can also have a kat-uit-de-boom-kijk personality. That one was trickier, and my solutions are all rather long. Read them here.
Dankbaar gebruik maken van
I came across this term in a translation I was doing, and I thought “I bet this is one that goes wrong a lot”. When I looked around, I found I was right. “To make grateful use of” is janky (= slechte kwaliteit) English, and doesn’t capture the right sentiment. In most cases, a much better translation is “to take full advantage of”. More here.
Herkenbaar
I struggled with this word in a recent translation, because when someone’s response to something is understandable, and you feel you might respond like that yourself, “recognisable” doesn’t work in English. Reader Karin came to the rescue for this one, and told me rightly that English speakers say “I can really relate to that”. More here.
Answers
My mother and her sister are a twin.
Should be: My mother and her sister are twins.
The word “twin” in English refers to one person who is part of a set of twins. So your mother is a twin, and her sister is her twin. Together, they are twins.
I have a great live.
Should be: I have a great life.
Many Dutch speakers don’t hear the difference between “life” and “live”, but to native speakers this difference is quite clear. This means that mixing up “live” and “life” is more confusing for native speakers than Dutch people think.
When a show is broadcast at the same time as it is being recorded, it is live.
When you are born, grow up, and die, that is your life.
(The verb “to live” is also spelled with a v, but it has a different vowel sound, so it is not the word that people get confused about.)
The organisation did a research.
Should be: The organisation did some research. Or: The organisation did a study.
The word “research” is uncountable in English, like “love”, “water” and “information”. You can do some research. You can do research. But you can’t do *a research*.
You guys have it better than Germans. Germans have the same problem with “research”, but they also have that problem with “information”. In German, Informationen are countable. A common mistake for Germans speaking English is *can you give me an information?* Sounds weird, right? Well, that’s how you sound when you say *the organisation did a research*.
It’s not that people won’t understand what you mean. It just sounds odd.
This is thé guide for dining in Amsterdam.
Should be: This is the ultimate guide for dining in Amsterdam
Two issues here. Firstly, you cannot put stress (= klemtoon) on a word in English by using an accent like that. Stress is signalled with italics. So if you really wanted to, you could write:
This is the guide for dining in Amsterdam.
However, English speakers just don’t really do this. Though the above sentence is technically correct, an English speaker would struggle with it. Instead, we add an extra word in English, usually “the best”, “the ultimate” or “the leading”.
Idiom in picture
Een gegeven paard niet in de bek kijken.
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
And finally…
Arnold Schwarzernegger speaks Dutch in the first minute of new Netflix series Fubar. The scene is quite ridiculous, but in this case this is not so much a symptom of Americans having weird ideas about Europe as it is a symptom of the whole series being quite ridiculous.
The great man’s Dutch is at 0:21: “een grote brand is in …? 200 meter van de Bleekhofstraat”. (Can you understand what he is trying to say? Please let me know in the comments!)
Also note that the responder is supposed to be BELGIAN. Sigh. I suppose we just have to be grateful that they got a native speaker at all… (He’s not listed in the cast, I checked. Would have been fun to ask him if he even knew he was supposed to be Belgian. They probably didn’t tell him, simply figuring Dutch was Dutch…)
(Fubar is a term from the military, by the way. It’s an acronym (= afkorting) for “Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.”)
(If video embeds don’t work in your mailbox, go here.)
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