More Translation Problems

Sometimes, classes get off topic. Most of my students like it that way, and enjoy testing out their English in “real” conversations, which means that they just want to talk to me about movies, and food, and Canada (but never Canadian movies or food--what does that tell you about national culture?)
So with one student, Sem, we got into a discussion of my own Russian studies, and how I was coming along in day-to-day life. I told him that I’m getting better, but that mix ups are always happening, and told him my little story about the martrushka. He loved it, so I shared the following story about my friend Jeff:

He had just come to Moscow, and was pretty good with his Russian already. At
2:30 in the morning, he needed to get some grocery shopping done, so he walked
into the supermarket and up to the deli counter. “A little tipsy” (according to
him--so in reality it should probably be more like “quite drunk”) he smiles at
the woman behind the counter and says “Mnye nuzhna” (I need) “sosoki.”
The
woman glares.
He thinks nothing of it, since the evil eye is basically the
“Hello, how are you?“ of Russian supermarket service. If Moscow supermarkets
were to go so far as to hire Wal-Mart style greeters, they’d probably kick you
in the ass and make fun of your haircut on your way in. So Jeff repeats his
request, and the woman only gets more upset, asking him what he wants very
curtly. Baffled, he finally just points to the sausages, asks for a half kilo,
and leaves the deli.
Only when he gets home with a dictionary does he realise
that he did not ask for sausages (“sosiski”), but for nipples.

Sem likes that story, and offers his own:

He was fifteen, and went with his class on a trip to…I dunno…Austria or
somewhere. They were all sitting in a hotel room, and goofing around, and one
fourteen year-old girl decided to show off her excellent English skills by
reading aloud from the label of a drink bottle to all the hyper teenagers
in the room.
“All natural!” she announces. “No preservatives.” And suddenly
turns bright red, and leaves the room to the laughter of far too many less than forgiving adolescents.
“Preservativs” in Russian means “condoms.”

And sorry for the consistently adult nature of these posts, guys, but the best translation stories are always the ones that are inadvertently sexual simply due to the fact that they are such easily made mistakes: in virtually every language, most sexual words are actually euphemisms. “Preservativs”, “putting out…“ That’s what we get for coding our speech so thoroughly….