If a non-English speaker feels like a ‘donkey out of water’, it’s right to change their words to help them get their point across clearly

“I want to take physical exercise with the guitar” – this phrase is what, my uncle informed me through much mirth, I was saying when I was fighting over said instrument (well, a toy version of it) with my cousin in India one childhood summer.

The confusion, and subsequent hilarity, was the result of my English-first speaking brain, translating the wordplay into a context that has no existence in Bengali. Play as in “I will play a game” (khelbo) simply cannot be used in the way we say “I will play the xylophone” (bajabo), and certainly not any others: “I will play a part” (hobo) in a, well, play (natok).

This has gone down in the annals of my family as one of many comical tales of my mangling of Bengali in my youth along with “wearing” insect repellent (in Bengali you “spread” it) and attempting to “comb” a cousin’s hair (comb is never a verb; literally translated, you “scratch” someone’s hair). But say it was the other way around – if Bengali was my first language, and I witnessed something and was interviewed by an English-language newspaper, saying “I was just scratching my hair when I saw the crash” – that would make me sound rather foolish, wouldn’t it? More.

See: The Guardian