Laura attempts to ring up people across Europe to find out about their World Cup songs — but armed only with an internet translator, the results are hilariously garbled and mortifying.
As part of an ongoing feature tracking World Cup songs from around the world (following up on Jake Angel’s selections from the previous week), Laura undertakes a comedy research mission using an internet translation tool to speak to people in France, Holland, and Portugal about their respective countries’ World Cup records.
The French call goes predictably awry, with Laura’s translated questions so mangled that her respondent barely engages. The Dutch attempt is shorter and equally baffling — the person on the other end essentially gives up, telling her “that’s stupid.”
The Portuguese segment becomes the show’s piece de resistance. Laura is handed a translation by the team and reads it phonetically without understanding what she’s actually saying. What she thinks is a straightforward inquiry about the World Cup turns out to be a deeply inappropriate come-on, complete with lines like “How are you, fat boy?” and “I’d really like a bit of tongue action. Maybe with you. Fancy it?” The Portuguese speaker’s bewildered responses (“See? See?”) make the confusion even funnier. When Scott reveals what she’s actually been saying, Laura’s mortification is complete.
The feature works as a perfect encapsulation of early-2000s internet culture — the unreliability of automatic translation tools becomes the entire joke, with Laura as the enthusiastic but unwitting dupe delivering increasingly unsuitable statements to bemused Europeans.
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