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Chinese Restaurant Suffers Large Translation Error

Posted by kdawson on from the invisible-and-insane dept.

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.

8 of 364 comments (clear)

  1. Cheap-ass Chinese by Matt+Perry · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:Cheap-ass Chinese by antic · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The same is true of business everywhere. Ugly business cards, self-made web sites, dodgy signage, refusing to post out a brochure because they were "quite expensive to print" - all because a lot of business people are watching their wallet.

      If Chinese restaurants would pay for the service, someone would make an absolute killing going through correcting even just the menus. Was in China a couple of weeks ago and wouldn't have seen an error-free menu anywhere in the country.

      --
      'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
    2. Re:Cheap-ass Chinese by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Beijing have supposedly removed dog off the menus for the duration of the Games.

      In Korea they 'permanently' solved the problem by forbidding restaurants that serve dog from using English to advertise the menu option at all.

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      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
  2. That is funny, but by greyhueofdoubt · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

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  3. Re:Great, but it is not... by cloverprince · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I can confirm this. In addition, if you put the last two characters together (kele), it literally means "joyful", and pronounces like "Cola".

    "Bite the Wax Tadpole" is irrelevent. "Keko-kele" does not mean that, not even part of that.

    Chinese is like Perl, which is highly context-sensitive. Most characters mean complete different things in different context. So there are characters that work just like sigils in order to disambiguous them. And people have to use delimiters carefully.

  4. Apparently some do it intentionally by Moraelin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  5. Same Error - Different place. by jupiter909 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/imaginepaolo/2691795861/in/pool-badtranslations/ This is all so funny. :D

  6. At least they are trying: by KombuchaGuy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    http://www.danwei.org/trends_and_buzz/beijing_cleans_up_its_sign_tra.php Farewell Racist Park, we hardly knew ye.

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