Christmas Lost in Translation

I am being especially reluctant to upload pictures from my camera to the computer before the month of December is over, meaning that a lot of the Christmas Party posts are sort of in hold. Here's some holiday cheer to tide you over: two stories from the conversational English classes I teach.
Story 1: Every week in my conversation classes we have listening time, where we listen to some sort of CD and then discuss what we've heard. This month, listening time has consisted of Christmas songs, and one Wednesday I asked the three students in my adult class what they wanted to hear (all of my classes are pretty small like that). This class is fairly high level, so I was confident they'd be able to learn from wathever song they chose. They picked Silent Night.
The version of Silent Night that we had a copy of had two verses. The first verse is the one everyone knows, the next verse went like this:
Silent night, holy night
Shepherd's quake at the sight.
Glory streams from heaven afar.
Heavenly hosts sing "Alleluia."
Christ the Savior is born.
We listened to this verse one line at a time, allowing students to repeat back what they had heard. I wrote down the words on a white board. When the verse was over, I gave them a short summary in simple words (the Shepherds are shaking as they look on....) I asked the students if they had any questions.
To my surprise, the student who used to be an English teacher (and is highly fluent) asked "Why were the shepherds shaking?"
I explained that they were afraid because the angels were talking to them.
"Why did the angels talk to shepherds?" the man asked next.
I launched into a very simplified version of the Nativity story, explaining that Bethlehem was in the country, so there would have been shepherds in the surrounding area... that's where we hit the road block again. The class couldn't figure out why shepherds would be around. I explained that there would be a lot of sheep so there would be people there to take care of them.
"Oh!" the former English teacher exclaimed, "A shepherd is a person?"
Apparently, in Japanese English, a shepherd is always a dog, like a German Shepherd, or a sheep dog. There aren't a lot of sheep in Japan (and the ones that are here were imported), so the concept of a person called a shepherd never made it into their vocabulary. I explained what a shepherd was, and everything made much more sense. I laughed all the way home at the mental image of angels talking to a bunch of dogs about going to see a baby in a manger....

Story 2: It's listening time again, in a different class. This is another adult class, and we've been discussing the idea of Santa riding in a sleigh pulled by reindeer, so I decide to put on the song Rudolf. I know this song will be hard for the class, so I start out with a quick version of the story of Rudolf. I explain that he's a reindeer with a red nose and so on. I figure things must be going pretty well because 3 of the 4 students are nodding pretty consistantly and making the "I understand" noise that Japanese people make when learning something new.
I finish and get ready to play the CD and the 4th student says something in Japanese to her friend, who laughs then replies in Japanese. Then everyone bursts into laughter. Every time I'd said the name "Rudolf" this one student had been hearing the Japanese word for tofu (Odofu). She'd gotten the basic story about how there's a reindeer with a red nose, but she couldn't figure out how tofu factored into the story. Once her friend explained that the reindeer's name is Rudolf, it was all clear to her, but she was quite confused for awhile.
So I ride home that afternoon with a picture in my head of Tofu the red nosed reindeer... I still haven't worked out how she could even follow the rest of the story with that in her head. Next time, I'll be sure to start by explaining the name...