Um desentendimento sobre pepinos gave us enough material to talk about since it has a lot to do with the confusing language context we live in. These days we were looking into some supermarket pamphlets when my husband spotted something he judged to be a translation error. On a pot of pickled cucumber they translated ‘Essiggurken’ (German for ‘cucumber in vinegar’ or ‘pickled cucumber’) into English ‘cucumber’, which according to my husband is a mistake since cucumber and Essiggurken are not the same thing. I retorted saying that for me they are the same thing. He insisted in saying they are not, since ‘cucumber’ is a fresh vegetable used in salads and Essiggurken are ‘Essiggurken’ drenched in vinegar, or better, they are two different vegetables. Well, that is really confusing. I also did not get his point until he told me they should have translated it as ‘pickles’. But pickles, I told him, can be any vegetable in vinegar, not only cucumbers… well, to make it short: I only knew one kind of cucumber, the small, dark green, thick cucumber, which in Brazil we use for salad as much as for pickles (the stocky pimpled ‘pepino’). He on the other hand has two images of ‘cucumber’, the one in the pot and one twice as long as the Brazilian, used only for salads in Germany. It was hard to convince him that the thing in the pot (from my point of view and also the pot’s translation’s) is a normal cucumber laid in vinegar. Well, he had to check in the Internet, and as I expected, I was found to be right. Nevertheless, I guess he is also not wrong… since the cucumber he knows (the one for the salad) does not go into vinegar. Well, I hope this confusing narration was enough to show that words do not always match their meaning in different languages. Even though they convey ’similar’ images or meanings, they might diverge due to culture specific referents that do not exist everywhere. Enough to say that Eskimos have several words to refer to different forms of snow/ice because they need and can distinguish among them all. As a Brazilian I only know one (‘neve’ for snow) and I might say I get really puzzled when Germans distinguish between two kinds (Schnee and Schneeregen). 
(ariadne)
Die Gurke des Missverständnisses actually does not have anything to do with cucumber per se, but rather with a sales promotion we received last weekend. The ad of a supermarket contained Essiggurken (pickles) but in the picture of the jar of pickles you could see that they translated the German word Essiggurke with cucumber. Now, my semantic concept of cucumber or Gurke is of this long green vegetable that I really hate and that is used to make salads. Contrary to my opinion my wife thought that it’s perfectly OK to translate the German word Essiggurke with cucumber, because, so she said, after all pickles are made of cucumber any way. Sticking to the concept of cucumber I had in mind I argued against that claiming that no Essiggurke has ever been made of cucumber and that only salads and that kind of stuff is made of it. Well, after some 15 minutes of dicussing and looking in dictionaries, I have to admit that she might be right, although the Oxford dictionary only refers to the kind of vegetable used to make salad in the entry cucumber. But an entry in wikipedia finally proved me wrong. Anyway, now I guess you have a rough idea of how it is to live as bi-lingual speakers in Babel with different native languages…But I still think that cucumber is not the best way to translate Essiggurke! Yes, I am stubborn 
(christian)
