Nick Cummins Quotes

Most of our life is miscommunication, and when you add a language barrier to it, it just becomes total mayhem and confusion... It just adds to it with all of the cultural differences. It could be an American family meeting another American family and you could still have a total clash. With family, it's like visiting another planet.

Some words have multiple meanings. Scholastic, aware that I'm allergic to preservatives, kindly got someone to translate the phrase "I can only eat food without preservatives" into Italian. They warned me, however, as they taught me how to say it, that the Italian word for "preservatives" is the same as the word for "condom." So that I should be careful how I look when I say it.

I think we're still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate.

I don't know if my sense of humor goes over Americans' heads.

Because of my language and the pantomime with which most Europeans accompany their speech, I was catalogued as a heavy.

Sometimes Americans don't quite get my sense of humor. My good ol' British sarcasm seems to go over their heads.

I have an all-Japanese design team, and none of them speak English. So it's often funny and surprising how my ideas end up lost in translation.

Even when well translated. can we really understand what other cultures are talking about?

The only thing that kept us from going bigger worldwide was the language barrier. All the corn that we did on 'Hee Haw,' it was hard to translate into their slang.

Sometimes I don't use the words 'will' and 'want' in the right way. The German word 'will' is the English word 'want,' so that's a little bit of the problem.

There is, I think, humor here which does not translate well from English into sanity.

I couldn't get along with the French.

In Korean, my lyrics are witty and have twists. But translated into English, it doesn't come over. I've tried writing in English, just for me, but it doesn't work. I've got to know everything about a culture, and I don't.

I can speak Cantonese, but I can't speak about fashion - I learnt all my fashion in Europe, so often, during interviews in Chinese I just don't know the right word - it can be very hard to explain things.

I have to slow down for some people. In Louisiana, people didn't have a clue what I was talking about. I remember seeing people glaze over. Seeing the moment where they've just completely lost all... They just wait for me to stop talking and then say, 'Yeah.'

I was my mother's translator until I was probably 12 years old, and I remember how people looked at her.

There are certain situations, when you're in America, when people understand you better without an Australian accent.

I hate when I see someone who speaks English speaking to someone who speaks a different language, and they're screaming as if going louder is going to help the other person understand.

I am used to being places where I don't speak the language. What I am not used to is being in a part of a country where few people speak my language. Call it ignorance, arrogance, or what have you, but most places I have visited, I was lucky enough to be able to get by with English.

If there is an interpreter sitting between two friends, he may be able to translate the words but not the feelings with which I say something.

With support jobs moving to China and India, it's not surprising that English-speaking countries' top frustration revolves around the difficulty of understanding customer service representatives. However, even if the level of customer service is exceptional, the extent to which poorly-understood accents trump quality of service speaks to English-speaking customers' growing intolerance of non-native speech, more so than in other countries.

Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don't understand.

I arrived in the middle of a press conference - as boring a thing to sit through if you don't know the language as it is if you do.

In India, whichever language you write in, the possibility of people not understanding irony or not understanding [remains there]. This as a writer is most terrifying!

I know how hard it can be to communicate in a different country, find your way around, and deal with the mentality of other people and different cultures.