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Now there's no excuse when the things I order online come with Engrish instructions.

Encrypting your dead tree notebook must have taken forever

No encryption. I write in Engrish. For the high school grads in the TSA, my notebook is non-threatening because it looks like college-level English that they can't understand.

It certainly can be both. Either way, it must be translated to Engrish first.

Engrish

Engrish

Chinese has minorities, but unlike other countries, they are doing something about it. They recently announced a policy of paying people to intermarry. If an ethnic minority person marries someone in the dominant Han ethnicity, they can receive a payment of 10,000 RMB per year for the first five years of their marriage. If they encourage enough mixed marriages, they may be able to eliminate all their minorities in a few generations. They won't have to worry about Tibetan separatism if there are no more Tibetans.

Why stop there when you could take it to the next level by having the police make the program apply to intermarrying Japanese, Koreans and Chinese, perhaps calling the end result Japkornese, ending the millennial hostilities once and for all.

Engrish motherfucker, do you speak it?.

Or just skip the translation and write directly in Engrish.

For the record

You can proofread documentation. so you don get the following.

Insert batteries in the proper way, happy fun is achieved! Do not go!

Or pretty much everything you see on this site full of examples.... http://www.engrish.com/

OR you can do tech support, China companies would KILL for a native english speaker to sit in the call center and answer angry phone calls.

For the fun: In Engrish please.

Like this?
http://adult.engrish.com/2005/09/20/think-really-different/
ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/debian-cd/

Hmm. Seems ALL browsers and OSs can be configured via to allow arbitrary:// protocols to be opened with a specific program, indeed the latter can do so with plugins... Even when echoed to my xterm, that FTP line creates a link that opens my FTP program.

Who cares when the patent was granted. It's iterative and obvious, and it has been such since the late 80s wherein I played MUDs that had this sort of behavior... Certain words in certain contexts while in the hub-world would become highlighted by the software when written and when activated (by typing a command or "tabbing" to them), would launch another BBS "door" program.

eg: Hey, don't forget to use up your LoRD forest fights today!

"Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
        Terry Pratchett, Hogfather"

AI, in general, isn't what most people think it is. You can make a stupidly-hard-to-beat game where the opponent plays "perfectly" against you, with perfect timing and unencumbered by the physical constraints of a controller, and you get what happens in most of the Street Fighter series (or about any other fighting game), where the "hardest difficulty level" or end-boss is unbeatable, seems to always get off the perfect shot, block, tech hit, avoidance roll, etc, until you start abusing a game-breaking technique or bug yourself to beat the game. That's actually pretty easy.

What's harder is making a game AI that acts somewhat seemingly like real opponents, that makes real mistakes and leaves openings for the player to work with while not feeling like you're just handing them the game.

Of course, on most systems (Nintendo's underpowered consoles most of all), the designers don't even bother, they just code in whatever the AI they want and the altered difficulty levels give the enemy bigger guns, more health/armor, or just drop even more enemies in a level to chew through. Or else the difficulty levels leave the enemy alone, but screw with the player's health bar and damage output to much the same effect.

As we start dropping "AI" into other frontiers, it doesn't get much better. Translation AI is still relatively poor, able to handle some word-for-word translations passably but being lousy the moment you come across colloquialisms, figures of speech, neologisms, parallel synonyms, malapropisms, simply typos, failures of homonym (there/their/they're, our/hour, its/it's, principle/principal). There's a reason it's so easy to tell when you get a tech call response that's outsourced to somewhere in Asia - most of them know just enough Engrish to try to translate word-for-word what they want to say, and so they come up with constructions like "Tech support welcomes you, may I please know the problem you have today" that could just as easily come out of Babelfish or Google Translate.

For pure problem-solving and pattern-matching, AI's proceeding slowly. Maps and GPS routing have their benefits but are certainly not perfect yet. "Automatic response answers" chat stuff is best tossed in the garbage bin, usually right next to a company's crappily written FAQ page.

If we also count people who know two or more languages, I'm betting English would be far more than 760 million.

I suspect you're probably counting a few tens of millions of people who believe they speak or write English, but really, REALLY don't.

Actually, one of the hardest things to shift is language-specific stuff. Pretty sure you're going to get caught when you turn in a paper in engrish.

Math and science on the other hand...

I believe the viral post you mentioned refers to http://engrish.com/ although they are not limited to Chinese.

There is a world of difference between translating between Spanish and English (two European languages) and English and Japanese or English and Chinese. Even bilingual people have trouble, www.engrish.com

Most of the stuff in the Engrish site is not a good example of difficulties in translation at all. A true example of difficulty in translation would be when a full bilingual (somebody who can understand and speak both languages correctly) would have difficulty rendering the meaning of a source language text into the target language without either using a lot of footnotes/parentheticals, or just dropping a lot of nuance.

The examples on the Engrish site don't fall into that category, for the most part, either because they're not really translations, or because they're translations but the people doing them are not bilingual enough to produce grammatical, idiomatic English. They fall into these:

1. English text used in Asian products for purely aesthetic reasons. In this case, the target audience doesn't know English beyond some elementary vocabulary, and the people putting the English text on the products neither. Hanzi Smatter is a site dedicated to the Western counterpart to this phenomenon. The technical terms for these are either "As Long As It Sounds Foreign," or "Gratuituous English," depending on the details.
2. Translations meant to communicate with English speakers, but done by people who don't really master the language; i.e., translators who are not fully bilingual. (Hint: if you want a translation to be right, you probably want to hire a translator who's a first-language speaker of the target language.) We could call this one "Eloquent In My Native Tongue."
3. Computer translations, typically of Chinese restaurant menus. These tend to involve the word "fuck" very often. (No, no clever names for this one.)

The top entry as of now says:

Our mission is to make our customer ... say what a so tasty!!

That looks-a more like Itarian.

There is a world of difference between translating between Spanish and English (two European languages) and English and Japanese or English and Chinese.

Even bilingual people have trouble,www.engrish.com

(same AC here, don't wanna waste my mod points)
Why would I want to set them straight? Engrish.com and sites like it are a continual source of joy for people who like playing with language and looking at words in new ways. That said, it in no way means that the Japanese are using these words correctly. If they were, it wouldn't be funny.

Likewise, westerners using non-English terms incorrectly may still be comprehensible, and certainly may be amusing to native speakers of the terms' language, but just because many westerners misuse the term in the same way does not mean they are correct. I bet there are a lot more Japanese using the word 'sushi' correctly than there are Americans using it to mean 'nori rolls' or 'sashimi'.

My favorite T-shirt design (emblazoned across some teeny-bopper girl's chest in the north of Japan):

Taxi Drivers Whip

The Sprinkle Dressing

Gotta love teh Engrish.

Cheers,

Sounds like something you'd see on http://www.engrish.com/

Indeed.

The Japanese make a mockery of WTO "free trade" regulations on a daily basis, but they get away with because they're a relatively small market compared to the US. By contrast, when some of us in the US suggest that maybe we should switch to "fair trade" that imposes tariffs on goods imported from places that have zero environmental protection laws and pay out slave-labor wages (to even the playing field), we get shouted at about "protectionism."

The Japanese also have a major cultural complex about what is "true japanese." If you have one grandparent who wasn't born in Japan (or worse yet, isn't ethnically asian), it doesn't matter that your family may have been there for 75 years, as far as they are concerned you're still a gaijin. If you're there for tourism, grand, but trying to live there and get employment, or even someday fit into Japanese society as a gaijin? Might as well forget it unless you're going to be an Engrish teacher (and even then, the "natives" will get promoted above you every time).

American and European products? Well, that's gaijin stuff.

I'm quite happy with my unbranded Chinesium MP4 player that I bought from Chinavasion.. All I wanted was something that would let me watch TV shows or movies at the gym. I looked at the iPod Touch and Nokia N800 products but they were all over kill (and over priced). This fits the bill perfectly. The software is XP only and just a gui wrapper to mencoder, but the ini let me write a nice shell script to do it on Linux/OS X.

There are quite a few products on that website that seem pretty cool. I'm thinking of getting the toothbrush cam to see if it will make a cheap bore scope for engines, etc. This hard drive enclosure seems pretty cool (Although I'm sticking with my XBMC).

The BEST part about all of these products is that they can't afford a proprietary connector nor can they afford to lose market share to not being able to connect to everything. Everything is Mini-USB or USB.

The biggest problem they have right now is UI and translations. The "MP5 Player Manuals" is quite entertaining to read and full of Engrish.

Geez...I already saw this post over at http://www.engrish.com/

"In the case of forced disappearance the word disappear, which is properly an intransitive verb, becomes transitive."

Or you know you could just laugh at the joke, because it sounds like the engrish mistranslations.

Even if it is the correct usage.

Don't forget

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We donâ(TM)t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." --James D. Nicoll

With commercial secrets like this, who wouldn't be afraid of Chinese spying?

http://www.engrish.com/recent_detail.php?imagename=dried-fried-ass-meat.jpg&category=CHINGLISH&date=2008-07-17

There are dozens of examples of funny mistranslations out there. Have a look at the Engrish site.

Correction: http://www.engrish.com/

(Posted as AC to not be a karma whore)

Just went back and looked at engrish.com I was disappointed because when I first discovered the site a while back, there were less posts, but all funny. Still worth goofing off from work for a while.

The Chinese authorities will do nothing about this as long as the mob is enforcing its Maoist goals. That will happen as long as the government still has popular support (which it continues to have, unfortunately).

Yeah, probably. But this attitude long predates Maoism, going back to Confucianism which emphasizes this sort of social control. And lots of people are pointing out that the current Chinese rulers are Maoist about like American rulers are Christian: They use the words for their social effects, but their behavior says they don't believe the ideology at all. Both China and the US are now effectively run by the corporate capitalist crowd, no matter what language they use to mask their real goals.

It's common for Chinese people to suggest that in most situations, they have a lot more freedom than people in most Western countries. Their explanation is that the Chinese government only pays attention to people who do something that's directly threatening to the governing clique's power. But other than that, the rulers don't much care what you do. The masses are mostly invisible from the top. It's only by speaking up publicly that you get their attention.

Of course, the down side of this lassez faire attitude from the authorities is that it enables the sort of vigilante activity that we're talking about. People know that, as long as it's not political activity, they can get away with it without punishment. (As long as you don't do something criminal enough to get the attention of the local police. ;-) At least that seems to be the explanation from a lot of Chinese.

One of the interesting bits of Chinese government crackdowns is their highly-publicized attempts to do something about the difficulties in driving around the Beijing area. Part of this is about making the streets safer for visitors during the Olympics. The fun aspect is their attempts to fix the often charming "Chinglish" translations on street signs, replacing them with something that actually makes sense in English. A few days ago, there was a nice example of how successful this has been. This site has lots of other great examples, but this one is fun because it's actually a new sign talking about the Olympics.

This story doesn't just state the actual sources, or targets; and uses fear to get you to go along with it. (that's called FUD propaganda)
Finally they close it up with the new documentary The New Face Of Cybercrime, Howard Schmidt, a former Microsoft executive/govt security dude. (Boy they sure been doing a great job over the last few years -- NOT.)

SCADA's lack of security is already well known. (The article itself refers to a wiki page! We all know the CIA's been busy with wiki too)

Look we live in a world where shit can happen. Grow up. Stop being such a chicken shit pussy about everything, an stop passing anti-constitutional laws who always nuke civil rights. Bad things can happen and people can die. Live with it. What the fuck have they done about the anthrax snafu..or 911 building 7, People died in that. This whole story is crap from the beginning to the end. Our government is lying to us like a crack hoe up all night for some shit to go in the hole in her arm. The GAO reports aren't even listed. Why should you trust a fucking thing that is told you without any evidence. You can't confirm any of this. What are you going to do a Google search. Good luck.
You trust this story you probably trust the made up lies the corporate media tells you about our elections.

Fuck howard's documentary, there are plenty of corporate media, propaganda outlets for that shit.


Instead go watch UNCOUNTED http://uncountedthemovie.com/ , there is where we have a real national security problem. There's is where we need to focus to clean up all this corruption nonsense, by regaining the constitutional right to vote again.

UNCOUNTED trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nJz09T0HME

The new face of cybercrime is fucking coming from your OWN GOVERNMENT via fiber optic splitters, telcos, AT&T, databases, and other unconstitutional ways.

Here is my final thought. http://engrish.com/image/engrish/wake-up.jpg

Better than this.

Oh the simple beauty of the warning label...

http://www.engrish.com/detail.php?imagename=olfa_knife.jpg&category=Household%20Items&date=2002-05-14

-Rick

This was on today's Engrish. Mixes prior "art" and patents.

That would be Chinese and Japanese - top to bottom, right to left.

Japanese writing has pretty much been converted to the western left to right style. Formal government documents and newspapers are written that way and in day-to-day life in Japan one will rarely encounter top to bottom writing except in traditional restaurants, certain stylized ads and museums. You actually encounter it less than outright English (English is very popular in ads see http://www.engrish.com/ ), which few people read.

My brief trip to China seemed to indicate that they've done the same thing there.

It's not an issue.

What the grandparent post is saying is that you might not have a full sentence, nor might a full sentence even provide sufficient information to perform the translation accurately. If Japanese and English were so easy to translate back and forth, don't you think that humans would have an easier time of it?

The method of analyzing bilingual pages is great for languages that have a similar structure to one another, like italian and spanish. In fact, this is part of how I learned spanish, by reading a bilingual copy of Don Quixote in high school. Slightly botching a translation from Spanish to English or vice versa might so much as raise an eyebrow briefly, but translating between Japanese and English requires an intimate knowledge of both languages. I do think that it will be possible with natural language processing systems in the near future (think less than a decade) but, no question, we're not that close right now. These guys saying that the technology won't be here within their lifetime have to be ancient or just forgetting how rapidly the pace at which technology accelerates has been increasing of late. How long ago was it that this here "Internet" only had a few hundred nodes?

Problem is, a lot of the time the human translators aren't much better (although they too are improving)

...before we see photos of the scanned documents in http://www.engrish.com/ ... What were they thinking of??

They probably used it to translate the instruction manual into Engrish.

The "Chinese Room" always makes me think of examples such as the one analyzed in this article. Look through the archive at engrish.com for many, many more examples, many quite funny. Here's one of my favorites. (How would an AI - or a human - know that this isn't the correct translation, unless they had and understood a lot of the context? It is a valid translation of the two characters, after all. ;-)

The ongoing attempts to make computers handle human languages keep falling afoul of this sort of problem. The above article uses the term "dictionaryitis" to characterize such translations, which are especially common with Chinese.

But it's a good, reliable source of humor.

Recently, foreigners in China have been lamenting the fact that, with the expected surge of tourism during the 2008 Olympics, Beijing has been redoing a lot of their bilingual signs. The improved translations have eliminated a lot of the fun of reading signs while travelling around the area.

The "Chinese Room" always makes me think of examples such as the one analyzed in this article. Look through the archive at engrish.com for many, many more examples, many quite funny. Here's one of my favorites. (How would an AI - or a human - know that this isn't the correct translation, unless they had and understood a lot of the context? It is a valid translation of the two characters, after all. ;-)

The ongoing attempts to make computers handle human languages keep falling afoul of this sort of problem. The above article uses the term "dictionaryitis" to characterize such translations, which are especially common with Chinese.

But it's a good, reliable source of humor.

Recently, foreigners in China have been lamenting the fact that, with the expected surge of tourism during the 2008 Olympics, Beijing has been redoing a lot of their bilingual signs. The improved translations have eliminated a lot of the fun of reading signs while travelling around the area.

Japan already has such a robot

Woosh.. like the sound of something flying by without hitting you? What a great analogy. Man, that's even more clever than this!!!

must...resist...posting...engrish.com...
gah. not strong enough.

me not self my help. I have got to kidding at you because it reminds me ofengrish.com

Considering english is mandatory in schools there, the number of people who dont know any is quite low, and mainly an older segment of the populace (insert korea-old people-email joke). Also, Romanji (as roman characters are called there) are used everywhere, from signs to advertising to hillarious clothing . But true enough, in many countries english domain names on a non english keyboard could be a real pain in the ass.

I don't think this is all that bad. Sure, people will say "The parents should read the label", but how many of those 'caution' labels do you actually read? The damn things are like Vista UAC warnings, you don't Actually read them, you just acknowledge them.

Anyways, if this group's inflammatory campaign motivates parents to better monitory their children's online behavior, then all the better. If Sony/MS/Nitendo lose a handful of sales to far right wing conservatives, I doubt it will make or break the bottom line.

-Rick

PS: Link for those "Label lovers" out there: http://engrish.com/

http://www.engrish.com/recent_detail.php?imagename =liquor-head.jpg&category=Engrish%20from%20Other%2 0Countries&date=2006-12-12

The whole German "handy" thing stems from a stupid obsession that anything English (or English sounding) is cool - it actually results in very bad English that looks stupid to people who can speak English properly, and is unintelligible to others who don't speak English.Sounds like the motivation behind engrish.

See also