Thursday, December 02, 2010

Aruba - una isla feliz ad.

"Globe Trekker" used to be a very popular show back home in India. The ever-entertaining host Ian Wright was documenting travel to several exotic places around the world. Today, as the weather fell to 28F for the first time in Florida this fall, I was watching the Weather Channel when this hilarious ad from Aruba tourism (@Mediapost) came on, and made my day.




Click to play.


A bit of background... Aruba is one of the islands in the southern Caribbean and a part of the Netherlands. The official language apparently is "Papiamento" and Dutch (according to Wikipedia). Aruba tourism has the popular catch phrase "One Happy Island" to depict the fresh and chill-out nature of the island.

In the ad, Ian Wright is at the docks and asks an Aruban fisherman the translation for "one happy island" in that local creole language. He gets a quick reply, "una isla feliz!". Then he asks for a word translating into "work-related stress" and gets no answer. ;)

In a related post, the Language log from Ben Zimmer points out that even English has no word for that phrase!

Aruba tourism: aruba.com

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