What do you do when you want a left-handed doorknob? Or a Magic Marker? Or fried eggs sunny-side-up? Or a harness for a handicapped service dog?
Many of these things will NOT be in your phrase book, nor will they be in your PDA. And if you use the online translation from Babelfish, the thing you get might not even be in the same animal-vegetable-mineral category as the thing you want.
There are two choices which I have found. The first is to spend U$S100 or so on a very complete pictorial dictionary. This works provided you always have your backback and don’t mind the extra dead weight in place of the cold beer you could be carrying there instead of some book.
The better and simpler choice, especially if you are even vaguely computer literate, and based on a few emails I have, a few of our readers, despite being perfectly lovely people, are pretty vague is to do the following; and this is easy.
Go to Google (www.google.com), click on the underlined “Images” link just above the search box, and then type in the name in english of the item for which you are looking, or that you want your housekeeper to do or to make: that was how I finally got sunny-side-up eggs, instead of juevos fritos any darned way they came out of the fry pan…
Now, when I need something for which no one can figure out the name in Spanish, I just print up a couple of examples, and people instantly smiled and nod and say lo conosco.
It works every time…and you still have room for beer in your backpack.
Great idea ! Thanks for the tip.
gia
Left by gia on October 12th, 2006