Where would we be without a phrasebook?
Alas, another casualty of the digital age. The phrasebook is being consigned to the great library of history as more people rely on smartphone translation apps. In a survey by the British Council, more than 60 per cent of 16- to 34-year-olds said they had used apps to familiarise themselves with the local language, with just 39 per cent relying on an old-fashioned translation guide.
What a pity. How we will miss the sight of Reginald, red of face, knocked of knee, brown-sandalled, bent over a phrasebook, his body language indicating great sorrow at the utter confounding uselessness of Johnny Foreigner.
“Scusa, is the museum open? When will the museum be open? Restauro? Per quanto tempo il museo è chiuso per il restauro…? For crying out loud. You wouldn’t think these people ran the Roman empire, would you?”
With its escalating litanies of despair, its haikus of hairpulling derangement, the phrasebook could achieve a strange kind of poetry. In his sublime essay “There’s No Place Like Home”, James Thurber pointed out that phrasebooks invariably contained “three times as many expressions to use when one is in trouble as when everything is going all right. This, my own experience has shown, is about the right ratio.”
As Thurber proved, the phrasebook was often most useful as a guide to the neuroses of the Englishspeaking traveller (“I asked for a first-floor room”; “If you can’t give me something better, I shall go away”; “I have seen a mouse in the room, you will have to set a trap”).
At its best, however, it could tell you a great deal more about the country you were visiting than simply how to order two beers. Staying in Cairo in 1982, I came across a marvellous, threadbare example, presumably designed for diplomatic wives, which suggested multiple
Arabic
phrases for telling servants what to do: “Put the tea on the table”; “We shall take luncheon at one”.
Far more enlightening than most history books, it opened a window into a long-lost colonial mindset. That Egyptian phrasebook reminded me of EM Forster’s lethal one-liner in A Passage to India about a complacent memsahib: “Mrs Turton has mastered Hindi, but only in the imperative.” Ouch.
Will the smartphone app really make the phrasebook extinct? I’m not convinced.
According to the British Council, one in five people says relying on technology has led to “misunderstandings” on holiday. I bet. Like the time my friend Rachel was on a minibreak in Marrakesh and texted a rather aloof surgeon she’d been on a couple of dates with. “I had a lovely tagine,” Rachel reported.
She was rather surprised when the previously taciturn surgeon replied with a sequence of increasingly amorous texts. Sarah found that her phone had translated “tagine” as “vagina”. Not a mistake you want to make in a Moroccan restaurant, ladies. Stick to a phrasebook is my advice.