Welcome / Bienvenue / Benvinguts / Bienvenidos
For information about my translation services, please visit the main site.
Pour des informations sur mes services, merci de regarder le site principal.
Para información sobre mis servicios de traducción, visite el web principal.

Why do the French have to call ice creams “glaces”?

Absolutely scandalous! In France, they call ice cream glaces. Why can’t they just call it ice cream? And why do the Italians have to call it gelati? And as for Spain, well, if you go to Madrid you’ll have to ask for a bocadillo de queso, if you want what everyone else calls a cheese sandwich.

OK, now I know what you’re all thinking. I’m sounding like one of those little Englanders who thinks that everywhere in the world should be like England. This is not what I really think, but is simply an illustration of the attitude shown in TeleMadrid’s latest anti-Catalan report. Once you’ve opened the above link, have a look in particular at the second part of the report (from 1:25).

Here are a few quotes from the report:

“If we want to eat in a restaurant, here is El Recó del Bon Menjar, which means The Good Food Place, and a sandwich is called an entrepà.”
“Those who are from Cádiz or Huelva do have problems. Writing bocadillo is not the same as writing entrepà. Entrepà de formatge [cheese sandwich]: we call that a bocadillo de queso, don’t we?”
“This, for example, is a baker’s [in Spanish, panadería], yet the sign says forn de pa.”
“At the end of our holidays we understood that here we can buy fresh fruit…”. The sign says “fruita”, whereas in Spanish it would be “fruta”, so obviously there’s no way a Spanish-speaking person can work out what it means.

Share: