THIS IS IT / ЭТО-ЭТО
A Crafty Interpreter post.
The hotel menu abroad offers "fried hope with garlic", "chicken in a hurry" and, under desserts, "cake of the grandmother, angry". You order the angry cake. It's very good. You don't ask. The instructions for the flat-pack wardrobe, translated four times on their way to you, say "Insert the happy screw into the ashamed hole." You find both. Somehow it works. Your manager runs an email to the German office through a translator. "Let's touch base" arrives as "Let us fondle the foundation." The reply is polite and very short. After 200 days on a language app, you confidently tell the taxi driver the name of your hotel. He nods, drives for twenty minutes and drops you outside a hardware shop. You buy a hammer, out of respect. **Why it caught on:** a young woman in big white headphones became the interpreter who reassembles words with no regard for meaning, often between English and Russian, so the jokes make two audiences laugh at once. Anyone who has trusted a translation app with a menu knows her work.