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Chinese Restaurant Suffers Large Translation Error
linuxwrangler writes "Preparing for English-speaking visitors, a restaurant in China recently ran its name through an online translator, took the result, then purchased and mounted a large sign displaying the English version of their name: Translate Server Error." This one has been around for a couple of weeks but it's destined to become a classic.
I can't wait to read the fortune cookies.
What would jesus do.. with open source software?
The original title of this book was 'Jimmy James, Capitalist Lion Tamer' but I see now that it's... 'Jimmy James, Macho Business Donkey Wrestler'... you know what it is... I had the book translated in to Japanese then back in again into English. Macho Business Donkey Wrestler... well there you go... it's got kind of a ring to it don't it? Anyway, I wanted to read from chapter three... which is the story of my first rise to financial prominence... I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street... many days no business come to my hut... my hut... but Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no. I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo... dung. ...Glorious sunset of my heart was fading. Soon the super karate monkey death car would park in my space. But Jimmy has fancy plans... and pants to match. The monkey clown horrible karate round and yummy like cute small baby chick would beat the donkey.
All your lunches are belong to us
The grandmother of an extremely attractive young lady in Toronto used Chinese characters in a design she embroidered on one of the girl's shirts. Somebody in Chinatown eventually pointed out to her that the characters said, "This dish is inexpensive but delicious."
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
It is not a gaff like, Chevy Nova in South America, No va meaning No go, but that could be truth in advertising. Or, "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken" being translated into, "It takes a hard man to make a chicken aroused."
Some others:
"It won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you." translating into "It won't leak in your pocket and make you pregnant."
Pepsi's "Come Alive With the Pepsi Generation" translated into "Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back From the Grave" in Chinese.
The Coca-Cola name in China was first read as "Kekoukela", meaning "Bite the Wax Tadpole"
Fight Spammers!
This, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should also internationalise your error messages.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Another classic that you may or may not have heard of is "fuck goods".
Due to simplification of Chinese characters, the words "dry" and a "do" merged into one single simplified Chinese character. In slang, "do" can mean copulation. The correct translation is "dried goods". You can see the rest yourself.
Don't quote me on this.
+1 Funny to the first one who can use DNS cache poisoning to trick a Beijing restaurant into calling itself the "Free Tibet Cafe".
Makes me wonder what the trendy tattoos of Asian writing actually translate to.
Oh, and if you live in San Diego and you come to a car dealership where they give you a "Leash Agreement" instead of a Lease one, tell them I said hi!
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
I have this impression of China that everything there is done as cheaply as possible without regard to safety or double checking, etc. It reminds me of one of my favorite blog posts showing the difference between the way the Japanese and the Chinese refuel a plane. Notice that the Chinese guy is starting the siphoning of the fuel with his mouth. The owners of this restaurant were too cheap to pay some English-speaking Chinese kid a hundred yuan to translate it for them. At least we get some laughs out of it.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
This also probably worked to their advantage - now how many people outside of China know about this restaurant? I figure people would at least want to go there to take a picture in front of the sign or whatnot.
(and I do), I'm sure you'll appreciate
http:://www.engrish.com
I record my sleeptalking
I have a street map of Kyoto with a legend translating the Japanese for "WC" into English - "Cornhole Palace".
Something tells me that wasn't entirely accidental.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
http://youfail.org/
Its funny; things just don't translate cleanly.
take:
Buck a scoop Chinese food.
babel it and you get:
é'æS--ç"äåoeäé£Yç©
babel it again and you get:
Resists stubbornly wooden scoop Chinese food
yummy.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
At least you can translate "American Idol" to Croatian and not get an error! Who knew it came out to be "Home Loan Lender".
Funny, but not news.
I'm sorry but I need to rant for a second here.
I have been reading Slashdot for a fairly long time, not as long as some but regularly since around 2000 or so. There are two main reasons I have kept coming back to Slashdot all these years when other sites have come and gone from my list of regular bookmarks:
1. Selection and tone of articles, centering primarily on tech news.
2. Quality of comments on said articles.
I don't have any hard data here (it would be a difficult thing to quantify objectively) but it _seems_ to me that both of these items have been in sharp decline over the last year or two.
I don't know if it's Slashdot trying to chase Digg, if it's some change in direction pushed by the owners, or maybe it's just my imagination. There seem to be two major content models with most tech news sites falling on a continuum between the two extremes. On the one end you have the strong editor model where stories are researched, editors decide what matches the tone and focus of the site and the majority of the material submitted is discarded. On the other end you have a user generated content free-for-all. There are advantages and disadvantages to each model, primarily in the trade off between speed and accuracy.
Right now Slashdot seems to be sliding towards a worst of all worlds, approaching the content quality of a Digg or Reddit but with the speed of sites with a strong editorial model like Wired or ArsTechnica. Lots of silly, irrelevant, or already debunked articles, and tired jokes that stopped being funny a week ago on other sites. There is no long term model for such a site.
The biggest thing Slashdot has going for it right now is a well known name and what's left of the commenters, which are still better than average and on a good day you can find at least one or two experts on almost any topic. The Slashdot editors (a couple in particular, you know who they are) seem to be throwing a great deal of these high-noise / low-signal stories on the front page. These stories may generate more comments, controversy, and page views per entry but they are changing the level of discourse and the image of the site in the long term.
Perhaps it's deliberate and the site owners have a game plan that is way over my head, I just want to point out that you are making a very real tradeoff in the long run.
That is pretty funny, but without the server error I've found chinese translators (traditional and simplified han) to work better than most languages. I was going to find a funny mistranslation, but my systran translator worked flawlessly. The worst I could find with my original subject line, "that was pretty funny," was, "that was quite funny."
The situation is worse with longer or more complex sentences and turns of phrase, but I was surprised at the level of sophistication of modern machine translation. This story should really be making fun of whatever server the translator was running on rather than the cafe owner or the translator itself.
What I find interesting about printed chinese english is that it is often printed in the same typeface. Look at many of the inspection tags, instructions, or 'made in china' tags that you have on products laying about; chances are that they are all in an identical old-fashioned serif typeface. Can anyone tell us the story behind this generic 'english' typeface that I run into so often?
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
...and get a Coca Cola sign.
http://www.hanzismatter.com/.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Snopes.com debunks the Chevy Nova myth and the Coke-tadpole story. I've never heard of the other two, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were bunk as well.
my chinese isn't good enough to confirm that it actually is a translation error...
for all i know, it's an accurate translation
See snopes: http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/tadpole.asp
I don't find this all that amusing. Not serious, just not funny. Whatever opinions you have on China (Tibet, free speech, Signapore), at base, one ought to respect the honest efforts of honest people to welcome a metric buttload of strangers. I predict great success with this name. Visitors will find it humorous and ironic - but not "haha" funny.
icanhas5yearplan?
Perhaps those Chinese restauranteurs are smarter than we think!
Now every geek across the world has heard of the Translate Server Error cafe, and the five of us that get out of our mom's basement and head to China for the Olympics are definitely going to look for this place and try it.
-David
The funny thing is that that site is blocked, at least in Shanghai!
The Chinese text on the banner (can1 ting1) is simply a generic term for "dining hall" or "cafeteria", which makes this even funnier.
It's not like I understand it, how can we expect the software to understand what it means?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This is too funny. It's way past plain bad Engrish which may still gives one a clue. Like you said, the owner was too cheap to ask a translator and was too lazy to double check the translation. I mean, he could at least re-translate the English words to Chinese to see if they were remotely close to what the original words mean.
The software they used should of given them an error message in Chinese instead on English. Translation software has no excuse for not providing error messages in the users language.
just talked to someone in China (Xian), and he told me he couldn't get to it...
Somehow, I get the feeling I've just been insulted...
When someone says, "Any fool can see
Checking name of store for translation online: Free Having a big sign created with what you believe the translation to be: 200 yen Having all the english speakers laugh at you because of the translation mess up: Priceless! For everything else there a 404 error!
Get the rope.
The quote at the bottom of the slashdot page makes this story funnier.
"HOST SYSTEM NOT RESPONDING, PROBABLY DOWN. DO YOU WANT TO WAIT? (Y/N)"
But like someone said, China is all about finding a way to do things.
Thanks. Good site.
Check out Language Log. They do not only have even funnier examples, but also try to analyze the source of the error, as well as translation problems in other languages. The latest installment in the series of Chinese-English mistranslations is The Sichuan's hair blood is prosperous, or check the whole category: Lost in Translation.
They also collect "Cupertinos", errors introduced by spelling checkers, or have you ever heard of US presidential candidates Barrack Abeam and John moccasin? It's a great log for anyone interested in language.
I don't see any reason why this is "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters", besides that many Slashdot users are delighted and excited by anything bad or sounds bad about China.
And it's not like this is only a problem going to English, we have committed some blunders, there are many stories how Pepsi's "Come alive, You're in the Pepsi Generation" translated to something in Chinese like "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead".
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
It is not even a fact that it is a restaurant. I can't read Chinese so I cannot verify that myself - but all the witty comments here rely on the fact that the label is indeed attached to a restaurant.
What if it is a computer repair shop or an Internet cafe?
The saddest poem
Apparently some people intentionally buy and wear stuff like that. As anecdote I present the Baka Gainjin (Stupid Foreigner) t-shirt. I don't know how many they sold, but since after all these years they still sell it... :P
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
having moved to Seoul about 2 months ago, I can report that there is a plethora of ridiculous english signs, t-shirts and other things here.
I've seen T-shirts that inexplicably contain paragraphs of random gibberish, or odd marketing phrases "Absolutely positively overnight!" I've seen businesses like popular cafes, Tom N Toms, Coffee bean, etc who have dozens upon hundreds of locations, yet have really strange signs. To me if you're going to open something with that many locations maybe have someone read over your mission statement who is a native speaker, hell I'll do it for $50. It has to be worth that much to you. A lot of sign problems come down to odd adjective choice (and I can understand their problem, if I look up "watch" in my English-Korean dictionary it gives me like 40 different korean words I can choose.. good luck.. ) and article issues (Koreans don't use the, an, or a in their language so they have no real concept of this) but good lord, Korea is crawling with English teachers who are actually native speakers.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/imaginepaolo/2691795861/in/pool-badtranslations/ This is all so funny. :D
Well done! Now I'm gonna have that commercial stuck in my head all day. :D
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
What a good name for a restaurant! I mean so unique.
Responses kyped from Boing Boing's reporting of this story on 7/15/08:
"I love their Segfault Chicken. And their Short Stack Overflow is to die for. Ooooh, and their 404 Not Pound Cake"
"How about some Core Dumplings?"
Cube On! (http://stores.ebay.com/PuzzleProz)
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.
http://www.danwei.org/trends_and_buzz/beijing_cleans_up_its_sign_tra.php Farewell Racist Park, we hardly knew ye.
sig free since 1993
... you may remember this incident involving some Israeli journalists translating a couple of questions into a terrible insult for the minister's mum ;=)
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
("chicken" being the slang for prostitutes).
In french ("poules"), that's the case. At least, it's familiar and not vulgar slang.
I suppose that in the US, 5 years olds also giggle to the original one, given the alternative meaning to the word "do".
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I remember how much fun we had with electronic translators in Poland - when you tried to translate the polish version of sentence "Germanium is a semiconductor" to english and then to polish you got something like this: "A man from Germany is a half-fuerher"
It's not that bad. They said the guy who had his name tattooed on his chest got a raw deal because it really says Coca-cola. That's not true. The words are a (poor) approximation of "Vincent", but if you asked someone to guess what English name was represented, people would more probably guess "Watson" than "Vincent". (This is for Cantonese "wat san"; it's completely different in Mandarin "qu1 chen2" and I don't think it approximates anything.) It just so happens that Watson is a chain store (using those Chinese characters for its Chinese name) that sells various things including, I guess, their own brand of soft drink.
I can't read the second tattoo because the picture is not of high enough resolution.
The third one uses a phonetic pun (works in Mandarin but not Cantonese) and is probably a deliberate obfuscation to foil an attempt to use a dictionary check: the middle word "shi4" means "strategic power" but is a homonym for "is". The bottom two words are the correct words for "villanous person".
I nowhere found the real meaning of the chineese characters, not on slashdot and not on the site referred to. So for all I know the translation is correct...
Can somebody enlighten me what the correct translation would be, and why this one is so funny?
Paai
BTW, "server" in eastern world is "waiter" or "waitress"
so that would be "waiter's error"
for my custom HTTP 500 error message!
Nothing is foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
... or embarrassment, depending on the auto-translator software. In line with automated processes being painfully incapable of making informed decisions... the link to this story's original is blocked by the Chinese content filter, though, to be fair, its not much of an attempt at real filtering, as use of any anon proxy will get anywhere one wishes to go.
It doesn't require a computer to mess up a translation. A few examples come to mind even before computer use became common.
1. General Motors couldn't figure out why one of their car models sold so poorly in Spanish speaking nations. The model was the Nova, which very loosely translated into Spanish means "doesn't go".
2. Coke decided to bring use "Coke, brings life" advertising slogan to some oriental nation. (I'm not sure which one it was but Japan or China is probable.) It was translated as "Coke brings your ancestors back to life."
3. Jimmy Carter on a trip to Poland said something like "Americans love the Polish people". The translator translated the phrase as something akin to "Americans have carnal desires for the Polish people."
Computers aren't alone in mistranslating things.
The world is filled with
There are dozens of examples of funny mistranslations out there. Have a look at the Engrish site.
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
I was in Shanghai China a few months ago. All of the restaurants in China if they had English translations were named "Big Luck Dragon" or "King Garden Restaurant" or whatever... basically, the same weird names you find in Chinese food places in America. I asked my host why the restaurants are named that, and if that's what the translation was for the restaurants that didn't have English translations. He told me they're named that way because the Chinese think it will attract Westerners. So, does it matter if you go to a restaurant in China named "Green Dragon Chinese" or "Translate Server Error?" Either way, the Chinese restaurants are doing it for your benefit.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
There's this finnish wannabe-celebrity, who has had some problems with spelling.
Snopes doesn't do too bad of a job there with the myth of the Chevrolet Nova, but they just miss the most glaring problem with the story: who would seriously believe that Spanish speakers would avoid buying a foreign car just because its name would be a pun for "no go" in Spanish? It's like the Americans who believe this story also believe that Spanish speakers are all stupid simpletons. (Hmmm, I might be on to something there...)
It is true, as Snopes points out, that the normal way to describe in Spanish a car that doesn't work would be something like "no funciona," "no marcha" or "no camina," and not "no va." However, you can also be pretty sure that, more than once, the hapless owner of a broken down Chevy Nova has jokingly described it with a pun: "Mi Nova no va"; "Tengo que vender el Nova y comprarme un Siva" (I gotta sell my "no-go" and buy a "yes-go"); etc. It's like the Americans who don't believe this story also believe that Spanish speakers are all humorless literalists. (Hmmm...)
Are you adequate?
if it was this restaurant
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
The journalists were dumb, but I think the Dutch Foreign Minister is being way too sensitive. Such an incident is FUNNY, especially concerning all of the serious issues a visit to Israel would entail.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
As an expat in China, my favorite translation for a mouth-watering chicken dish was "slobber chicken".
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. :)
... and he was SO PROUD he picked the Japanese for himself because he could read "horse" and thought it must mean something virile. Horse + deer = baka, which means... heck that is practically English already, if you don't know ask any geek under the age of 30.
Last I heard he had it removed and replaced with "samurai" or something, which I sincerely hope he got checked prior to inking.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Belongs to us is all bases you :)
Unfortunate translations from one language to another are probably some of the funniest humour there is - but let us remember that it goes both ways. Like eg. the term "GP", which in UK means "General Practitioner" - IOW your regular doctor. "GP" sounds uncannily like "chickenarse" to a Chinese.
Surely you are joking about the translation not being correct- the sign says "Translate Server Error."
But Ok, the Chinese characters say "can ting" which means restaurant.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
In my opinion it was not a confusion at all, it was just a joke purposely made to the fact these cars were not very reliable.
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
As for correcting the error, you can offer to do it for free and you will be turned down, because that is a matter of honour. The person who did it wrong would be having their mistake pointed out, and would thus lose face. This is much less palatable than sticking with an incorrect sign.
Ahh, yes. That whole Southeast Asian "losing face" thing.
I wonder what having his cheapskate error exposed to 500,000+ slashdot readers did to his "saved face"?
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock