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For those three of you who haven't seen it yet, http://hanzismatter.com/ is the canonical site for idiotic people getting themselves permanently tattooed with a language that they don't understand.

Apparently fifty cent (the rapper) wanted 'mad flow'

He got 'crazy diarrhea'

When this site http://www.hanzismatter.com/ published the picture and translation his lawyers sued.

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.)

What's left of his skin was littered with simple cross and line markings.
 
... upon closer inspection the scientists determined this to be Chinese writing which says "Forever Protector of Old Ladies". Work to locate the man's Facebook profile and collection of popped collar shirts is continuing.

Now back to you in the studio, Dave.

For some perspective on the other side, the site Hanzi Smatter (run by a friend of the owner of engrish.com) has a great collection of equally high-quality use of Chinese (and Japanese and Korean) by westerners. The best part is that westerners really seem to like to use Hanzi/Kanji in tattoos; the result is a bit harder to fix than a gaffe in a manual or a sign. :)

http://www.hanzismatter.com/.

Why read and get involved in a meme when it just makes you unhappy?

I find Engrish funny.
I find http://hanzismatter.com/ funny.
I find it funny when the Tick could only speak high school French.
I find it funny that the only words of Spanish Beavis knows are "Burrito" and "Spaghetti".

I guess I find language jokes funny. If that includes Engrish, then so be it.

*sigh* I remember when my friends (who had broadband, and I had dialup and I think was grounded for a while from the internet for downloading some *cough* pictures) were talking about AYBABTU. One even got a bumper sticker for his car. For some reason I was under the impression some Chinese hackers had hacked the CIA's website and had meant to be "badass" by declaring that they had owned the US's intelligence-gathering office. However, in a stroke of irony, they employed horrid grammar.

It wasn't until I was ungrounded that I found out the truth.

I'm not sure which version I like better -- hackers screwing up the pr00f of 0wn4g3, or that the Japanese could not translate to English.

As a sidenote, I just bought myself a shirt that says "REFLECT BABOON it does no matter where you come from" and one that says "HIPPOpoTAMUS brother it takes care when playing GEE THANKS" here in Japan this week. This is of course balanced out by the kanji mistakes on Tian's site.

Not quite, but http://www.hanzismatter.com/ is close...

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