As a professional linguist, I can't help believing that if anyone should be aiming to address the sources of confusion in language (never mind translation!) it should be people who do what I do. Sometimes when people "know what something is", that information is just not as helpful as they like to think. For example, I myself happen to know that "hake" is a kind of fish, but I don't know what it looks like - either in the water or on a plate (if you even eat it!) - but I do know what cod, trout and salmon look like, in the water and on the plate.
See the 2nd entry under "Restaurant Anecdotes" http://jhs.rinkworks.com/said/restaurants.shtml
Maybe this teenager isn't that stupid - after all, is it that crazy to believe that they don't make a point of teaching you expressions like "half a dozen" in maths lessons at school? Not that I really am definitively implying that this teenager isn't stupid, mind, if he actually knew that half a dozen is six. But if he didn't, maybe when he heard the customer use the expression "half a dozen" he guessed that a dozen meant twenty - it just seems a more likely guess than twelve, doesn't it?
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