Even Greener Pastures

Are there any country names in any of the languages you know, that also mean something else? Anything like Turkey - turkey? I can only think of not Poland but Polish - polish in English. In Czech, "Peru" also means "I'm doing the laundry" and "Kuba" (Cuba) is a male name and also a dish made from mushrooms and pearl barley.

If I remember it well, the fruit salad is called "Macedonia" in a few countries (including Italy).
I've heard a few Polish people using the word "Amerykanka" for a kind of sofa-bed (we call it "wersalka" more often, after the residence of French kings).
An African country Chad is written "Czad" in Polish, and this word means also carbon monoxide (the poisonous product of an incomplete carbon burning) and is sometimes used in slang speech as a synonymous with the good entertainment at a party or a rock concert.

Thank you SuKi. So if peru is turkey but Peru is Peru, they face the same problem. Chizuko's comment made me realise that on the pronunciation level, there are more words like this: the whales of Wales and the lovely finish of the Finnish furniture...

I like my turkey chile served on china.

Wow, Laos... I wasn't sure how it was pronounced. I had to check.

I know how to make a Mexican wave and I've seen a Pole dance but I couldn't make a Swiss watch.

Mais oui. Who could resist French kisses?

And while we're in a romantic mood, there's a tiny island off the west coast of Scotland called the Isle of Ewe. Guess how it's pronounced?

It may sound strange but a turkey is not called a turkey in Turkey. They are called "Hindi". But Indian have no idea that Turkey was a Indian citizen! 😀

This video is interesting which shows how poor turkey is being mistaken by many names around the world.

Nobody ever heard of French kisses?

　I heard it many times but I don't know exactly. How do you do that? haha! Anyway, it reminds of me an old love story movie, French Kiss of Meg Ryan. It is a good movie. I watched three times.

It may sound strange but a turkey is not called a turkey in Turkey. They are called "Hindi". But Indian have no idea that Turkey was a Indian citizen! 😀

Great website and video, Sunshine.
But in French it is simply called DINDE!
In Arabic it’s ديك رومي (deek roomy) = Roman chicken

If I remember it well, the fruit salad is called "Macedonia" in a few countries (including Italy).

Indeed Martin a fruit salad is called “macedonia di frutta” in Italian.
Did you ever eat an “insalata russa”?
It’s cold cooked small bits of carrots, mixed with peas and other unidentifiable vegetables (usually canned), drowned in a heavy mayonnaise sauce.

Mayonnaise has also a geographical origin. Some say it comes from the name Mahon, one of the Balearic Islands.
 

But now about something different than food. Have you heard about 'French disease'? They used to call it French or German disease here, while English disease in France and Polish disease in Russia... The names show potential ways of spreading of... syphilis.

Indeed it shows how armies spread the disease all over the Old World. But there is always a bit of racism behind it, bad things come from the others never from oneself . Syphilis has to do with sexually, so nice people have nothing do do with it, only foreigners do certain practices, think about the “Greek way” for exemple.

This reminds me of a Czech expression we use when we encounter something unfamiliar we struggle to understand. We say "to je pro mě španělská vesnice" (that's a Spanish village to me). In German, it's "Das ist mir ein böhmisches Dorf" (that's a Czech/Bohemian village to me). A bit of background and some expressions used in other countries (written in German):
It says that to Polish people, things are "Chinese", and something incomprehensible is a "Czech movie" to them. Do you use these, Martin?

And "Czech mistake" (Czeski błąd) we say when we swap letters while writing a word (like I could write "wirting" instead of "writing"). It's probably because we have words looking similarly in our languages before we take a closer look. Sometimes we use it saying about swapped digits in a number.

French s.e.x  (oral)
French doggie (about a person who seems to be to delicate and complaining about everything)
Russian/Ruthenian month/year (ruski miesiąc/rok) - very long time
English weather - rainy
Pretend to be a Greek - pretend not to know sth
Austrian talking - empty talks which lead to neither  conclusions nor working

What about cockroaches? One that's called the German cockroach in English is "Rus domácí" in Czech. We tend to blame things on Russians so we obviously didn't think they came from the west, unlike the black rat, which is sometimes referred to as "němkyně" (Německo means Germany).

I don't think there were any translation problems of Czech movies really. And I know there were great movie makers in Czechoslovakia and in most of communist countries too. But I think there could be the availability problems with more ambitious movies. I imagine the first step was always the censorship in the country of origin  - many good films in our countries were left on shelves without the censorship acceptance. Some of them were ridiculously cut before showing to the public. The rest had to wait for better times. Now imagine that a country wants to export its movie to show them abroad (in the other country of the communist block). They know it has to undergo the censorship in the other country too. So if they allow it and the others reject - it would be shame. You can imagine: "Are you crazy comrades? What are you trying to send us? It's potentially poisonous to the working class!"
So that's why I think the foreign movies we were allowed to watch were thoroughly checked against any lack of ideological correctness.

The other problem was, that the communism was different in our countries. In Poland we always had a little bit of freedom  (going to church, possessing small parts of land, making movies that laughed at some aspects of life in our country), but our economical status was very low. The shops were empty. When a luxury article (e.g. toilet paper or meat) appeared, long queues were formed in front of the shop.
I was happy to travel to Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other countries then and I was surprised seeing things like chocolate, coffee, orange juice, ham, and other luxury goods there. We could buy it there and eat, but it was very hard to smuggle even small quantities to our country. It could be a reason some of us had problems with understanding the type of humour of our neighbours. We were laughing at different things.