English to French translation

Misunderestimated

January 13, 2009

I'm completely snowed under at the moment but I wanted to mention this latest Bushism, which Twitter was buzzing about recently. During his final press conference, George Bush said: "At times you misunderestimated me". It is a term he first used in 2000 and I really like it. Could it be the perfect word to sum up the 43rd president of the USA? Please feel free to offer a French translation!

(via jamesward)

Comments

It could be pretty fun to translate. What would you say in French ? "Vous me mésousestimez" ?

Ha! On the French side, I came up with "sous-mésestimez" but I prefer yours!

Unfortunately in Italian merging the two verbs is impossible, as "underestimate" is Sottovalutare and "misunderstand" is Fraintendere. How do you make a pun out of those two?
However, there is another verb, Sottintendere [literally: "sub-understand"!], which looks like a synthesis between the ones above but actually means "to imply", or "to make an implicit reference". I just invented Sottofraintendere, which could be translated us... "undermisunderstand". Imagine George W. saying: - You undermisunderstood me. That is: you could have misunderstood me even more than you did, as I uttered a lot more non-sense than you can remember.

I like Laurent's proposal. I couldn't find a good translation into Spanish.

for Spanish I thought of "malsubestimar"... the "sub" doesn't come in for both verbs, so it's more like the Italian above (perhaps "frasottovalutare"?) in that it adds another prefix to "underestimate". anyway, a quick Google search proves that I'm not the first to come up with it, as there are blog postings that include it at least as far back as September of 2008 in both Spanish and Portuguese -- all with reference to Bush, of course :)

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