Culturally diverse continued . . .

The phenomenon of foreign drivers in a foreign country is just as amusing. Talking to English people about facing the roundabout at the Arc de Triomphe insights an extremely funny reaction. If you ever want to see someone go pale and possibly faint I would suggest mentioning this. Another cultural anomaly seems to be English road rage which is not so pronounced in other countries and therefore other cultures. One of the best examples of road rage I can give is my dear father who has a persistent problem with cows that crowd the common where he lives. It is a true infestation of cows and they roam free over the roads and countryside. I am pretty sure my father thinks that the cows have a vendetta against him. As they really do seem to wait for him to drive past before they amble slowly into the middle of the road and stop there to consider the meaning of life. They wait there very patiently while my father waits not so patiently behind the wheel. The threats that seep from his mouth are quite entertaining and he winds himself up into the greatest state while the cow just merely stares at him chewing cud. He then runs through a very extensive list of profanities until the cow decides that this may be a good time to leave and check out the greener grass on the other side. No cows were harmed in the making of this road rage. This is however a serious problem that affects many of the English citizens and we must do what we can to raise awareness around the world. The French have a different way of handling this rage and they tend to merely beep their horns over and over and over and over and over and over again. However if this were the way that English people dealt with their road rage then there would be some incredibly confused girls walking the streets thinking that the really angry people in the traffic jam had taken a moment to let them know that they were good looking. As I said before these cultural differences are incredibly hard to translate unless you are an English student living in Paris and then you just spend most of your time confused.
Obviously I am only qualified to mention incidents that I have actually witnessed and in places that I have actually lived in although I have it on very good authority that this is a worldwide dilemma.
I bet you are wondering what all this has to do with translation . . . well it is very simple. It is not just words that need translating as there are also cultural nuances to take into consideration. You have to know the cultural aspects of a language as well as just the vocabulary. We can all laugh at the messes that are caused by lack of cultural knowledge but would you truly want that in a CV or in another document that you want translating? This is how we deal with translations at both LinguaSpirit and FreeSpirit. Every aspect of the translation is taken into account and we endeavour to make it the best we can.