12 November, 2010

This may be just the one for you!



There's a guy in our neighborhood who works in local real estate, and posts his listings quite often to our local email chat. The thing is, there are a lot of native English speakers in our town, and so he thoughtfully uses Google Translate to post in English as well. So considerate of him! I first noticed the resulting trouble a couple of years back, though, when he posted that a particular apartment had a:




Conveniently located near hope? Huh? Then I realized that he had translated from Mikva, our Jewish ritual bath - which looks quite like the Hebrew word for hope, and had evidently slipped through. Ridiculous, right? Can't get worse than that, right? But each time he posts, lo and behold, I find something new. 


Almost every post has
And naturally
But sometimes, if you're lucky, you might get a:




That's surely helpful. 


Perhaps you're looking for
That sounds pretty good, right? But what if I offered you
Then you'd really have to think about it. 


There's certainly no beating a
I mean, who could possibly turn that down? And yet, I find this one almost as tempting:
Right? Come on, confess - aren't you just a little bit curious to see the giant?

You might think that in the market nowadays, people don't really expect payment - but it turns out:

Anyway, I've been saving these up for as long as I can remember. And then, when I saw this one last week, I thought - Toby! This is it! 

This is the one that might actually get me to leave my beloved apartment! I mean, really! Even re-reading it now, I'm not sure why I haven't yet called. What an amazing perk!
Okay, all you Hebrew speakers out there - can any of you guess the origins of these mixed-up phrases?

Have a great week, everyone!

8 comments:

Dina said...

Hilarious! Don't you just love machine translation?!

Anonymous said...

Every garden needs a giant to watch over the fruit trees and errant children! And an invested kitchen is my dream kitchen!

Sheva said...

this one rely had me laughing out loud, see I even wrote it out, no lol here

Mrs. S. said...

You can use 2 families
That's an awesome deal, because apparently most realtors require you to use a minimum of 5 or 6 families...
:-)

Malke said...

I came here through Mrs S' link and it was well worth it-had a good laugh. I figured out most of the translations but for the life of me I can't figure out the "you can use 2 families" one-what is it?

toby said...

Malke: it said
ניתן לשימוש 2 משפחות
(can be used by two families)

:-D

treppenwitz said...

ok, you owe me a new keyboard.

Maya / מיה said...

Haha... wonderful!