I have a book written for Thais to help with the English Titled"4000 words". An awful restaurant is translated with: ร้านอาหารน่ากลัว You seldom see awful used like that, "the awful awe of the angry law". I suppose it happens from Thai to English.

I have a book written for Thais to help with the English Titled"4000 words". An awful restaurant is translated with: ร้านอาหารน่ากลัว You seldom see awful used like that, "the awful awe of the angry law". I suppose it happens from Thai to English.

I haven't been to too many scary restaurants but I've met a few restaurant owners who where definitely น่ากลัว .

ผมกลัวร้านผี

I see that if both Thai (ร้านอาหารน่ากลัว) and English (An awful restaurant) phrases are combined we end up with "a frightfully awful restaurant"!

... try translating that back into Thai!

I bought a thai-engl/engl-thai dictionary about 10 years ago which has 20 pages in it, that are back to front, making it somewhat confusing, trying to find a word in that section. About 5 years ago I bought the two-tome "New Model Thai-English dictionary" compiled by So Sethaputra for 1.000 Baht. It´s actually very good - however it wasn´t until I was back home in Germany that I discovered that pages 475 - 514 were totally missing, !!!!! I wrote to the publisher, who informed me that another company had taken it over. Eventually they did actually send me the missing pages free of charge with a long apology for the inconvenience............ so all turned out well. However, I must admit that some of the examples in this dictionary make one really want to ask why on earth anyone would choose such hilarious examples to explain a word or expression.............. ""my overcoat is moth-eaten all over!.............or ""I am so hungry that my stomach is drawn in"....or "that man´s face is extremely ugly" or "he found his wife in the arms of another man" . However, I must stress that it is a very good dictionary, using many expressions relating to average thai and rural situations. I´m not really intending to knock it.......