Geoff publicado en la Argentina!

Thanks to the Goobabelfish mind-app, I can read and speak and think in every language ever written. Well, not every language. Who wants to think in ancient Egyptian (dog-man cane snake eye dog-man cane)? Accordingly, whenever I read one of Geoff’s stories, I automatically read it in mostly-all languages. As you can imagine, this can sometime cause unintended humour.

For example, Geoff’s story “Teaching Bigfoot to Read“, which was just published in Spanish as “Enseñando a leer a Pie Grande” in Revista Axxon in Argentina. This is Geoff’s first foreign publication!

When translated into Pre-Conformity Trandarish (a language that will flourish for three centuries on the floating garbage continent known as Pacifiland [motto: as big as Texas minus all that trash]), “Teaching Bigfoot to Read” becomes rather hilarious. As the Trandarishians (the Trandarish speaking inhabitants of Pacificland) have no word for reading (being a post-literate society), “read” is translated as “idea fishing”. Also, “bigfoot” doesn’t really translate either, the best approximation being “mega-flipper”. The story then becomes “Teaching mega-flipper to idea fish”.

As you can imagine, the story loses some of its flow.