Same Sky Magazine

Be Careful of Careless Invitations

Languages just can’t be trusted. As a language teacher, I often see how dangerous it is to simply translate any concept word for word - relying on a dictionary as your only way of learning a language is bound to lead to problems. One really good example of that is the seemingly harmless verb, invite.

The problem with invite is definitely best illustrated by the bad experience of a bunch of German students I used to teach. They were on a business trip in Brazil, meeting some management counterparts in a factory the German company had just acquired. They were all speaking English with each other, since Portuguese and German weren’t languages they had in common.

On the last evening, the Brazilian managers invited the Germans out for dinner. And they used, in English, a phrase like “We’d like to invite you out for dinner.”

The Germans heard one key word, invite, and translated it to the German, einladen. In German, that means that the Brazilians were going to be paying for the dinner. The Germans were excited, because it was a really expensive restaurant. They went along and ordered copious amounts of food and alcohol.

Then the end of the night came. One of the Brazilians collected the bill from the cashier and then told the Germans how much their share was.

You can imagine the surprise. The Brazilians had correctly used the word “invite” in English, where we don’t necessarily think that anyone is responsible for paying. The Germans had to scrounge around with credit cards to pay their share of the meal (and had trouble claiming this big expense back from their company!).

I often tell my students this story and teach them phrases like “It’s on me,” or “It’s our shout.” Anyone who speaks another European language tells me that invite in their language means that whoever invites has to pay. It’s funny that there’s this extra meaning to the word - but it wasn’t funny for the out-of-pocket Germans in Brazil.