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As I should sing (text in English)

Here’s a transcript from the beginning of an online meeting I had last month with a kind and patient accountant:

Me: On the Helena. Common star.
Accountant: To the right. I say Go feed bank.
Me: I sing sing of Oyster Ben. In town, and Career should come. We arrest.
Accountant: Say.
Me: E, tambing, it's pretty much temp of the push then you should Sobra. I mean, if she had activity that feeling inside.
Accountant: See, there's no physical. 
Me: As I should sing. Then you can control. On the He was saying to Do. I do and do site. Okay. Bacteria. The key. Until it comes site commissary merch. I stupid going to sober.

The transcription makes no sense. The meeting, on the other hand, made perfect sense and concluded with me submitting my tax return. What’s going on?

The short answer is that I forgot to change the language on the transcription software. The software did its job of converting the sounds of our conversation into words, but its frame of reference was the English language and we were speaking Portuguese.

With a special combination of effort and dislocation I can decode some parts of the transcript. The trick is to try and also try not to try. You have to make the sounds that the words indicate (according to the rules and customs of English), and at the same time hear those sounds as words in Portuguese. It reminds me of the first time I drove a left-hand drive car, letting the right hand do the things that the left hand was used to doing.

Using this method I can hear that On the Helena. Common star produces sounds close to the Portuguese words Olá Helena. Como está? which in turn translate as Hello Helena. How are you?

And As I should sing corresponds to Acho que sim meaning I think so or I agree.

Other parts are more resistant. I’m fairly sure that the sounds In town, and Career correspond to então, eu queria which translates as For this reason I wanted to. In the transcription the whole phrase is In town, and Career should come. Despite saying it out loud many times I can’t find the corresponding words in Portuguese for the sounds should come.

Interpreting sounds with reference to the wrong language happens in conversation too. At the cafe the other day, as I waited for a friend to come out of the loo, I overheard a family at the next table repeating a word that sounded somewhere between jota (meaning the letter J) and chute (meaning kick). 

It was a short word and it was being used in a conversation about an everyday subject (how the family were getting home from the cafe). I'm always hungry for new words so I tried to memorise the sound and waited for the meaning to be revealed. 

My eavesdropping was rewarded when of the adults explained to the youngest child that shot or shotgun or riding shotgun means sitting beside the driver in a moving vehicle. I couldn't interpret the sound jota or chute because I was scrabbling through my Portuguese word hoard to help me: I was looking in the wrong place.

A pavement laid with square and hexagonal paving stones


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