Phrase Book - Notes

Notes

The British comedian group Monty Python featured a phrase book containing wrong translations in two of their sketches. (See Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook.)

The expression "My postillion has been struck by lightning", supposedly included in some phrasebooks, is used to describe some of the less likely to be useful phrases found in some books.

The 1972 short story by Joanna Russ, "Useful Phrases for the Tourist", takes the form of an excerpt from a phrase book. Since its initial appearance it has been reprinted nine times, and has been translated into Italian and French.

Phrasebooks exist for both living languages and for non spoken languages such as Meissner's Latin Phrasebook

The absence of vocabulary related to mental illness in commonly available phrase books has been examined by Mac Suibhne and Ni Chorcorain who surveyed a range of phrase books. All the books surveyed had sections on health: 12% (n=3) had vocabulary for depression and 40% (n=10) had vocabulary for anxiety disorders. Two of the publishers had produced phrase books which contained a word for ‘anxious’ in the general dictionary, without any cultural context, 16% (n=4) had a (context-free) expression for ‘I feel strange,’ but none had a word for ‘psychosis’ or stated how to say ‘I have a diagnosis of schizophrenia.’ The authors suggested that collaboration between psychiatrists and publishers could achieve appropriate ways of rectifying this situation.