Lost in Translation (And Kinda Loving it)

Aug 29, 2026

I used to think I was a pretty good talker. Turns out, solo travel and a language barrier will make you question everything, including whether you actually know your OWN language, let alone another.

This episode is about the growing distance between my brain and my mouth, the mistakes I made trying to connect with strangers, and why I decided those mistakes were worth making anyway.

 In This Episode

• I unpack (pardon the pun) why solo travel turned me into someone who talks to cats, chickens, and cobblestones
• I admit the real reason I sometimes avoid conversations with strangers
• Tell you what might happen if you ask for ‘twisted chicken potatoes’ in a pharmacy
• Share what using the wrong word for a full year taught me
• I tell you about a conversation with a stranger that ended in one perfect piece of grandmotherly wisdom
• I make the case for why connection matters more than getting the words exactly right

Episode Highlights with Timestamps

• [00:55] — Episode ten kicks off with balloons, streamers, and some sobering podcast statistics
• [03:53] — Why I have started talking to myself, and to every cat and chicken I pass
• [06:04] — Talking is hard. I blame the growing gap between my brain and my mouth on menopause
• [08:33] — The “valley of language melting pot,” where French, Spanish, and the local language end up in the stew
• [09:47] — Why I start avoiding conversations, and the fear underneath it
• [11:47] — What if your attempt to speak in another language is an epic fail (dental floss anyone?)
• [13:07] — Free plums, and what happens when you take the risk anyway
• [14:06] — Visibility is hard; so in English
• [16:57] — Michel calls me out, and is annoyingly right, again
• [17:49] — A conversation with a stranger – “relax”

Links and Resources Mentioned

• Google Translate (used throughout the trip to have real conversations across language barriers)
• [email protected]

If this one made you laugh, or made you think about the conversations you avoid, I would love for you to subscribe wherever you listen, Spotify, Apple, or anywhere else podcasts live.

That way you never miss an episode, and honestly, we need to take the pressure off my husband as the one person who I know will always listen!

And if you want more of the behind-the-scenes travel moments, come join the Laughter Revolution Digest at marlasimlett.com. It is the fun stuff that does not make it into the episodes.

Full Transcript

Marla Simlett: Welcome to the Laughter Revolution. I’m Marla Simlett, your host. And this podcast is based on the premise that while life can be heavy sometimes, getting through it doesn’t always have to be. Because laughter.

So this morning I’m in Sighișoara, Romania. It’s my third stop here in this country, and I have to say—I love Romania. I can’t believe it took me so long to get here.

But today I’m here to talk about my latest thing that I’m learning and laughing about as I’m traveling on this six-month trip, which is talking. So I’m gonna be talking about talking, which is pretty meta of me, I think. Is it? I don’t know. That’s gonna be one of the things I talk about today.

So before I start, though, I have to strike up the band, hit the button that’s gonna release the balloons and streamers from the ceiling, invite in the crowds. Yay! Woo-hoo! Go Marla.

‘Cause this is the 10th episode of Laughter Revolution. I can’t believe it’s already the 10th episode. And you might not think that’s a big deal, but I thought that it was, so I actually looked up some podcast statistics, and they’re a little bit sobering.

So according to my research, 90% of podcasts have less than three episodes. So I’m already in the 10%. Woo-hoo! The next statistic is that of that last 10%, 83 or 90% have less than 10 episodes. Woo-hoo! I’ve already beaten that if I get this one in the can and out, which I intend to.

And it’s because of a thing that they call podcast fade, which is, you know, a podcast host comes in, and they’re very excited and all wound up, and then their download numbers and the responses that they’re getting to the podcast aren’t what they hoped they would be, so they kind of give up.

Now, that is not gonna happen to me because, yes, I may not have a lot of listeners right now, but it turns out I can just talk to myself and I’m perfectly happy.

So even if I only have a few listeners, and I know there’s a couple of you out there, I am happy to keep doing this because I love it.

I love sharing the information. I love the process of doing the podcast and marketing it, and I’m gonna keep going and hopefully help at least one person or amuse at least one person.

Now, I know there has to be at least one person who listens to this. Michel? Michel Gougen, are you there?

So Michel, my husband, hopefully is at least the one person that listens to this, and he says he does, and who am I to not believe him?

But just in case, I’m gonna throw in a code word: Snuffaluffagus. ‘Nuff said. I’ll let you know what happens with that.

So here’s the other statistic I’ll give you. Only 1% of podcasts get to 21 episodes. So I am almost halfway there, and I’m gonna keep going, and I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

So again, celebrating because I believe in celebrating success.

Now, let’s get to the meat of this.

Speaking of talking to myself, I’ve been learning a bunch of stuff about language and talking, and my own reaction and the way I am in those realms as I’ve been traveling these last almost three months.

So the first thing I’ve realized is that, you know how they say “so-and-so really likes the sound of their own voice?”

Turns out I do, and I need to hear it because I find since I’m traveling alone, I’m talking to myself so much more often.

Sometimes, depending on where I’m staying and what I’m doing, I don’t talk to anybody for days other than just those kind of polite exchanges at a market or in a coffee shop or whatever.

And I find that I need to hear my own voice or I need to be talking and having conversation.

So I’m observing things and providing commentary. Today I was walking through the old town and I was commenting, “Would you look at all these cobblestones? That couldn’t have been easy to put down.”

Or I’ll see a cat rolling around and I’ll say, “Well, listen, cat, you know, cute as you are, I think that’s probably not a good place for you to be in because you’re gonna get run over.”

Or, you know, “Hey chicken, do you think it’s really a good idea to cross that road?”

Now, I’m not often getting answers, which is good, so I haven’t moved quite that far into the crazy tourist lady who talks to herself.

But I think it’s just funny how much more I’m needing to hear some conversation.

As an aside, it’s interesting because I’m finding what I think must be some kind of gender bias in some of the countries that I’m in with the animals.

When I travel with Michel, my husband, I’m always at least greeting animals. It’s one of the weird things that I do.

“Hey, puppy. Hello, cows. Hey, horses.”

And when I’m with Michel, they always answer back.

So I’ll say, “Hey, horses,” and I’ll hear this, “Hey, Marla.”

Or, “Hey, puppy.” “Hey, Marla.”

Yeah, but when I’m by myself, they don’t do that.

Hmm. I wonder why?

And giving you a little wink and a thank you, Michel, for humoring me in my silliness.

So the next thing that I’m learning about with talking is that it’s really hard.

So all the countries I’ve been, you know, they have some degree of English, even Scotland. And just joking with you, Scots. Love you, and I could listen to you talk all day, but honest to God, sometimes it was really hard to understand what was going on.

But even with that bit of English, you know, I try to learn some of the language of every country that I’ve gone to, and this is my eighth country so far. Eight distinct languages. So it’s been a bit of a challenge.

And what’s even more of a challenge is the difficulty that I’m having.

Now, I’m gonna… This is just a theory. This has not been proven, but it feels like the older I’ve become, and I’m gonna blame it on menopause ’cause I blame everything on menopause. It’s a catch-all for anything that goes wrong with me or a “woman of a certain age.”

But it feels like the distance between my brain and my mouth has increased exponentially the older I get.

Because it takes so long for a word that’s clearly right there in my brain to be processed down and come out of my mouth, and hopefully come out correctly, than you can imagine.

So as an example, the word for thank you in Romanian is mulțumesc, and I’ve pretty much got that down when I’m by myself, and I repeat it over and over to myself.

But then the situation comes up where all I need to say to somebody is thank you, and by the time the word leaves my head and gets out of my mouth, they’re gone. The moment is over.

Same with—I was talking today in one of my reels on Instagram about how I’m trying to learn how to say, “I don’t speak Romanian,” because I have a lot of people coming up to me and speaking Romanian, and I wanna be able to share that with them as a starting point.

So in my head, I’ve repeated many times, “Nu vorbesc limba română.”

And then I can go on to say, “Vorbesc engleză,” I speak English.

But by the time that smooth, clear sentence leaves my head and makes that long five-kilometer journey down to my mouth, it’s been about 15 minutes, I swear.

People have left. They’ve just looked at me weird and moved on.

So that’s a challenge, and I’m not exactly sure what that’s about, but it’s been a real thing. So trying to deal with that.

The other thing that I’m finding is that somewhere between my brain and the five kilometers down to my mouth, there’s also what I’m calling the “valley of language melting pot.”

Because often when I’m kind of in a panic of, “I wanna answer this person who’s speaking to me in another language,” my brain knows that I need a different language, but on the way down it gets lost in this valley, and it just spits out any foreign word I know.

‘Cause I’ve got a little French, I’ve got a little Spanish, and so that can look something like this.

Somebody will come up to me in a coffee shop and ask me in Romanian or Norwegian or whatever it is, you know, “More coffee?”

And I will say, “Gracias. Oui. J’adore le coffee. Mais, it makes me, ooh, poco loco. Mais, yeah.”

And the person’s just looking at me stunned. Pours me some more coffee and walks away.

And in the meantime, what I really wanna say is, you know, “Da. Mulțumesc.”

But they’re gone.

So that’s a challenge as well.

So between all these things—not being able to get the words, not being able to remember the words, different words coming out than I want—I find one of the things that happens for me, and I’m really fighting with this trip, is that I start to avoid people or start to avoid conversations.

And I’m trying to figure out what that’s about ’cause I’ve done it on other trips, and it really impacts the experience that I have on the trip.

Because the thing that I love about traveling, and what I’m realizing is my best travel days, are the ones when I’m connecting with people.

You know, having those moments of a shared conversation, a shared laugh, just even a shared experience.

And if I’m shrinking away from that, then I’m losing the value and the joy of what travel means to me and why I’m on this trip.

So a couple things I’ve thought of that might be the issue.

One of them is that, you know, I don’t wanna look like an idiot. I’m worried that people are gonna think that I’m stupid or people are gonna think that I’m weird.

And, you know, I’ve already discussed that what other people think of me doesn’t really matter.

And particularly in a land or country or a world where I’m never gonna see these people again. They’re in a coffee shop, they’re at a bus stop, they’re in a pharmacy. I’m never gonna see them again, so what they think of me doesn’t matter.

And if they have a look on their face of skepticism or of disdain or whatever it is, number one, if that’s the look they have, they’re not somebody I wanna talk with anyway.

And even if they do, it doesn’t matter.

The other thing I’m realizing is that not only do I not wanna make myself uncomfortable by feeling kind of out of my depth and insecure or whatever, I don’t wanna make other people uncomfortable because I’ve noticed there’s some other people that I’m around who seem to shy away when they know that I can’t speak the language.

So it’s a common thing.

And so I’m finding what I’m doing is really pushing myself not to shrink away.

I’m going out of my way to try to have conversations with people so that I can connect with them.

And I’m using AI. It’s been great to have my phone and Google Translate.

I’ve had some fabulous conversations with people just through Google Translate, and the little bit of gestures and facial expressions, and some of the giggles that we can have together.

It’s been really awesome.

And I’m also just allowing myself to make mistakes.

I mean, this is the whole thing, right? We don’t have to be perfect. We allow ourselves to make mistakes, and then we can learn from them.

And, you know, what do I care if I walk into a pharmacy looking for dental floss, and I ask them for chicken-twisted chicken potatoes?

Sure they’re gonna look at me weird. Chances are I’m not getting a twisted chicken potato at a pharmacy, but it doesn’t matter.

And hopefully, if I deliver that with a shrug, and a giggle, and an expression of asking for forgiveness and some friendliness, it will be met—

And I find if it’s when it’s the person you wanna talk to, it is met with that friendliness, and it becomes kind of fun.

So really pushing myself on that.

This morning, rather than just wandering around the old town where everybody’s used to tourists, I made my way over to the farmers market to get some more plums.

If anyone’s heard the story of the kilo of plums, I just got a few today, and some corn actually.

And was able to communicate, you know, just using gestures, and mulțumesc, and a few of the words that I did know.

And it was lovely, and I enjoyed it.

So… and to tell you the truth, they gave me free plums.

When they measured how many plums or weighed how many plums that I wanted, they just threw them in with the corn.

So how nice is that?

And I would not have had that experience of that Romanian generosity had I not taken myself there.

So those are the things that I’m learning and where I’m pushing myself.

Now, I did wanna tell you about one more thing that’s come up for me when I’m thinking about talking, and this goes back to the idea of me being meta, talking about talking, because what I’m finding…

So I’m trying to be more visible in my travels and with people that I’m communicating with.

But in the last year, I’ve been becoming more visible out in the world in English, which is my first language, and I’ve been speaking it since, you know, I was two, so 57 years.

But so here I am.

I’ve got this podcast where I’m speaking. I’ve built a business as a professional speaker and an emcee.

I’m doing social media reels on Instagram, and Facebook, and Threads, and I’ve also got a blog.

So I am now making my life about being visible in speaking and sharing my knowledge and my thoughts and my wisdom and all of those things.

And what I’m realizing is that I may not speak English as well as I think I do.

So a little background. I’m a voracious reader. I’ve always been a voracious reader.

I was always reading when I was a kid. My favorite thing was to go to the library and get a stack of library books.

And because of that, I have what I think is a pretty good vocabulary. I know a lot of words. I know what I think are a lot of big words, and I can use them in a sentence typically, but I don’t always know exactly what they mean.

And so, you know, for an example, I say, “Oh, this is really meta of me,” ’cause I’m trying to be cool and sound like, you know, a hipster.

But I don’t really know what that means, what meta means.

I think it means that you’re, you know, you have different layers of the same thing.

And so when I say I’m talking about talking, I think that’s meta.

Meadow? See, I can’t even speak. Meta.

But maybe that’s not.

The other really good example is soy.

So I’m allergic to soy or sensitive to soy. In any case, if I eat soy, I feel like I’ve got the flu for about three days, so I avoid it.

And when I… For the longest time, I was telling people when I would talk about soy, I’d say soy is insidious.

And then one day, probably about a year into that, I thought to myself, “Wait a minute. Is it insidious? What does insidious even mean?”

Well, insidious means proceeding gradually and with, you know, kind of harshness.

And yes, that’s how soy sneaks up on me and my physical body, but that’s not what I meant to say.

Turns out what I meant to be saying is that soy is ubiquitous, meaning it’s everywhere.

Even places you would never think that there was soy, there is soy.

And, you know, saying that forever, nobody called me out.

Nobody said, “Marla, is soy really insidious? Is that what you really mean?”

So I was using that word and not communicating what I actually wanted to communicate.

As an aside, again, it’s always an aside about Michel, but he’s probably one of the few people who will call me out and say, “You didn’t pronounce that right,” or, “I don’t think that’s the word you want.”

And poor Michel, he’s always trying to help me, but I do get a little defensive about that, and I might give him the look.

“Who are you to tell me I’m not doing it right?”

And then I go look it up in the dictionary, and it turns out he’s right.

He’s almost always right. Michel knows a lot of words.

But here’s my point: I don’t always use the right words, so I’m having to be a lot more thoughtful about that, which is good ’cause it means I’m learning what words actually mean.

Because I don’t wanna be giving, doing a reel or doing a post or podcast episode and saying words that I don’t really mean and not communicating my message the way that I want to.

And where this came up for me, where I started thinking about it was—and this brings everything all together. Look at me bringing it full circle.

I was at a bus stop on my way from Oradea to Breb, and there was an elderly woman sitting there, and so I decided I’m gonna go out of my comfort zone and have a conversation with her.

So we used Google Translate and had a lovely conversation back and forth for probably a half an hour or more.

I found out that she had been visiting a cousin. She had leukemia that had been in remission, and now it was back, and she had kids and where they lived, and she was asking about me and my travels.

And when I was thinking about describing that story for a reel or as part of one of my blogs, I was thinking in my head, “And she looked at me dubiously when I told her that I did indeed have a husband, but I just didn’t bring him on the trip.”

And then I had to think to myself, “Did she look at me dubiously?”

I don’t know that that woman had a dubious bone in her body.

I think maybe she looked at me—was it incredulously? I don’t know.

And so that just led me down a rabbit hole of trying to figure it out.

What I ended up realizing is that the look that she gave me was envy.

Maybe she was a little disbelieving. Maybe she had some doubts about it.

But really, when I finally got it across to her that, yes, I had a husband, but I was traveling on my own, she gave me this look and said, “Relax.”

Out of the mouths of grandmothers.

I suspect she’d never had a relaxing vacation in her life with her husband.

And I think if I had told her that, “You know what? I relax all the time at home anyway ’cause my husband looks after himself,” and it’s a different relationship than maybe what she has in her generation and culture, her head might have exploded, so I kept that to myself.

But anyway, that was a great experience talking to her and figuring out my words and using AI, and I think that’s where I’m gonna end this podcast, on that positive note of relaxing, connecting, and some laughter.

So I hope you enjoyed this episode, and if you know you did and you want to stick around until we are well into the 21st episode, because it’s just gonna get better and better, subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts, and then you’ll get an update every time there’s a new episode, every other Thursday.

And if you want to see more pics of my travels and things, you can subscribe on my website, marlasimlett.com, to my Laughter Revolution Digest.

And you can also follow me on Instagram and Facebook where I’m posting reels in different spots. And you’ll get to travel along with me, which I would love.

I’d love to hear from you, too.

If you want to talk to me about talking, if you want to talk to me about laughter, if you’ve got things that you’re laughing about or challenges that you’re coming up against, or anything you want to talk about, I’d love it.

Send me an email at [email protected], or connect with me on those other platforms.

That’s it for me. Snuffleupagus.

And everybody have a great day, and remember, until we meet again, laugh more, be well, become your greatest you.