Tongue tied....

My Spanish friend Montse, owns a bookshop in Ibiza town. She's just been holding a mini book festival, and one of her authors was a very famous Edinburgh writer.

Having spent a couple of years living in Scotland, Montse's English is pretty good, so she was looking forward to doing a bit of Spanish/English translating...

This morning, she sent me a WhatsApp, telling me how it went. For starters, she said, the writer's accent was incredibly strong, so she had to really concentrate. Then, she said, the only words she began to pick out, were ones that started with F, B, C, Effing C, Effing B....so she didn't want to translate those to the literary society of Ibiza!

On top of that, she thought he was drunk, which made him even less comprehensible.

A few customers were quite cross that she wasn't translating the author's speech into Spanish for them...

"In the end, I had to lie to them," she said, "I just told them he was speaking in Old Scots, and that they were lucky to be listening to such a gifted linguist!"