Cultural language differences

Cultural misunderstandings

We present to you new extracts from the intercultural adventures that you sent us following the summer game and we thank you for them.

Carrying different meanings, words can give rise to embarrassing or incongruous situations. Pay attention to humor and intonations!

“tchin tchin” in Japan

At a conference in Japan, while we were wishing each other good things while raising our glasses of champagne, our Asian friends burst into loud laughter, leaving us Europeans speechless. Finally, we all started laughing without understanding the situation which ended up becoming embarrassing. Finally coming to their senses, our Asian friends gave us explanations: ' tchin tchin' sounds in Japanese like one of the terms designating the male member. Running out of ideas, we quickly went back for a second glass to dispel our collective embarrassment.

Moral of the story: always be careful what you wish for yourself. A burst of laughter came so quickly!

By the grace of God in Gabon

There are words and expressions that resonate very differently depending on the culture in which they are used. To the ears of some, they go unnoticed, while they sound like gunshots to the ears of others.

I experienced this in 2017 while attending a conference in Libreville on a major infrastructure project by the Gabonese government. The speaker, trained in the United States, attacks his presentation of the strategic plan as a Western economist would: slideshow, tables, dates, figures, forecasts, etc. A well-presented, rational, impeccable specialist speech. Until the moment he utters the following sentence: “if by the grace of God, the construction of the GSEZ port is completed on time…”.

Pardon ?!?!

A quick panoramic glance allows me to see that I am the only one who flinched. Apart from me, there are only Gabonese people in the room. And yes. When we are of French culture, and more generally Western, we have a very rational perception of things: the construction of an infrastructure is a question of money, technologies, HR, management, regulations, deadlines to respect, etc. But the speaker, who lived and studied in the United States, has not forgotten his African roots, with the part they give to the irrational, in the positive sense of the term. That is to say not the absurd, the illogical, the fanciful, but rather that which, despite all the efforts made, cannot be rationalized.

It is a question here of a form of wisdom as much as of spirituality, of cultivating the idea that there is something beyond us, that we cannot master everything, that the unexpected is part of life. and it is better to accept it.

The weight of words, the shock of interpretations… and the puzzle of pronunciations

The French, as everyone knows, are accustomed to witticisms and puns; this inclination can easily lead, if we do not pay attention to it, to disasters, as I was able to observe to my cost, a few years ago, during a working group bringing together colleagues of different nationalities .

Because I had previously lived and worked in West Africa, I was placed in a pair with a Senegalese colleague to reflect on a given theme. Although my friend was undoubtedly brilliant and intelligent, it is clear that his personal investment in our joint work was “limited” because he spent more time joking with the other teams than putting ideas down on paper.

After a few hours, annoyed by his casualness, after several reminders, I ended up telling him in a joking tone: “You are a real griot with your jokes…”. I had barely finished my tirade when I saw him close up. What I thought was an innocent joke was actually perceived as a personal and family insult. As he explained to me a little later, such a statement on my part was all the more unforgivable since I had lived in his country and knew its customs and customs.

Indeed, if the African griot is a character who spends his time joking and amusing people in the street, I had completely forgotten that this public entertainer who knows everything and can say everything about everyone, in fact belongs to a caste social that we despise and fear at the same time. The word griot has a double meaning, I had made a considerable mistake by wanting to be humorous, my colleague only retaining its pejorative connotation from my remarks.

Apart from apologizing, which he accepted because he had good intentions, there was not much to do. But it served as a lesson to me and I promised myself to turn my tongue seven times in my mouth in the future before joking again with a stranger.

Talk to me in a different tone!

Living part of the year in Thailand and having the habit of walking in the countryside around our home in an area where dogs abound, I learned from the beginning to ask people if their dogs don't bite. My question regularly generated amused smiles, accompanied by denials and long comments whose meaning escaped me given my low level of command of Thai. Thinking that I had been understood, I continued on my way with complete peace of mind...

One day when my wife was accompanying me, I finally had the explanation: in fact when I asked whether the dog did not bite I was generally told that the horse (in this case not present) did not bite but that the dog yes…

Thai being a language where the same “word” can in fact have up to five different meanings depending on how it is pronounced, the word “Ma” can thus mean “dog”, “horse”, depending on the intonation given. “come” or “mom”. Of course, when I thought I was asking if the dog didn't bite, I was actually asking something completely different, hence the general hilarity of people.

One thing is certain, I am now seen in the surrounding countryside as someone who is very wary of horses, which is after all a way like any other to make yourself known.