Europeans may think they know how to speak English, but they don’t. Marketeers seem to have a particularly hard time translating slogans into English (“Nothing sucks like an Electrolux”), but businessmen and politicians have made their fair share of mistakes as well.
But while the English might cringe at the occasional pidgin English of their European colleagues, Europeans are fascinated by the English habit of, well, not quite saying what you mean. For example, how many non-Brits could decode the irony (and literary allusion) which lies behind the expression “up to a point”, which is used to mean “no, not in the slightest”?
For anyone baffled by these differences, this handy translation guide has been doing the rounds on the Internet.
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