Mistranslated, created and performed by Erica Jean, was on at Gulliver’s in Manchester’s Northern Quarter as part of Greater Manchester Fringe Festival 2026. It’s a very amusing hour of language failures and could have had the sub-title of “It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it”.
Erica is a self-confessed polyglot. She’s fluent in 7 languages (including Thai, Japanese, and Indonesian), and proficient in several others. The audience was equally linguistically diverse with Bulgarian being the outlier, and the show is mainly an interaction between her and the attendees, chronicling the absurdities of attempting to talk in another language – so don’t expect profound discussions on the topics of the day – but the CIA might be lurking in the background.
As an extreme example, in several tonal languages the word for “bird” is the same as for “penis” depending on how it’s pitched. In Korean (?) “Would you like to see my cat” is an opener when intimacy is on the cards. I won’t give the whole show away, but we were then asked for our own failures.
My contribution was when I last attempted German on a flight and had had a couple of glasses of Swiss (Schweiz) wine. A new attendant noticed my empty glass and asked if I’d like another. I said yes, and she then asked what it was. I replied “Scheißwein”, a very unfortunate slip. She walked away and probably informed her colleagues that there was a madman sitting in row four.
It’s a lively hour that ended with us all raising our glasses and saying “Cheers” in a different language.
The show is on for 2 more nights (tickets HERE), before she takes it to Edinburgh.
Paul Schofield for Canal Street Online