Did they ever ask, Excuse me, why hasn't someone turned the box around?
Ms. Bent's dialogue reads as if it came out the wrong end of a maniacal Italian-to-English Italian-to-English Italian-to-English formal you," someone says by way of apologizing translationer.
Have you ever found a perfume that seemed to have been made for you, a perfume that mingled with your skin in such an arresting way that a stranger in an elevator might turn and ask: "Excuse me, that scent... what is it?
Once you are accused, no-one stops to ask: excuse me, did you really say this?
In the study, a stranger approached someone waiting in line to use a photocopier and asked, "Excuse me, I have five pages.
She looked at Muhammad, then at me, and in a thick Irish accent asked, "Excuse me; are you Ali's son?" "No, ma'am," I replied.
As the other students listened, young Prokofiev approached Rimsky-Korsakov in the corridor and asked: "Excuse me, Nikolai Andreyevich, have you ever practised onanism?" "Of course!
Vendors in red-white-and-blue shirts carried milk crates through the bleachers and asked, "Excuse me, would you like peanuts?" But even things that seem normal in the United States translated in odd ways.
As she slowly made her way out of the cafe car, a cheerful boy, 8 or so years old, stopped her and asked, "Excuse me, is that sushi?" Without skipping a beat, she replied in a thick New York accent: "No, dear, it's cheese.
It opens with a closeup of a woman as the off-camera narrator asks, "Excuse me, did you know that for four years Rick Lazio was deputy whip to Newt Gingrich in Congress?" The woman looks stunned and says she did not know.
There are things in my notebook which I later published and therefore always remember: the breathless, denim-jacketed couple from the provinces asking: "Excuse me, is this the way out?"; the man walking up Friedrichstrasse who exclaimed "28 years and 91 days!" (that's how long he had been stuck behind the Wall); the improvised poster proclaiming "Only today is the war really over".
