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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.
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".
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.
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.
Well, pre-unicode chinese "wide" (multiple-byte, but actually typically wider on screen too, due to the higher level of detail required to convey chinese ideograms) charsets like Big5 and GB still included "fullwidth" latin characters (fullwidth: double the width of normal latin characters, so that they fit in "better" with chinese ideograms at that width). Actually, unicode encodes them too, for backward compatibility (adding to URL-spoofing problems).
These fullwidth "latin" letters are at different code points to normal ASCII!
The chinese tend to decide the fullwidth forms look "better" with serifs (more stylistically compatible with their ideograms), so they almost always have serifs, and since they're not (well,the "fullwidth" ones anyway) at the same encoding points as "real" latin characters, changing the latin font tends not to change the chinese-"latin" "fullwidth" characters, so they keep looking like the same old serif forms from the chinese font. So even with the best of intentions, it tends to be difficult to get rid of the ugly old serif characters when localising something originally produced in china, especially if the work isn't being done by a total computer geek who has a hope of understanding what's going on when he selects the fullwidth latin characters and changing the font doesn't work as expected.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fullwidth
To be fair, though, I (a native, English-speaking American) couldn't parse "Buck a scoop Chinese food" the first two times I read it. Without a number ahead of it, "buck" reads like a verb. I think you'd need near human-level intelligence when given that string out of context to deduce that you're not talking about bucking a scoop of Chinese food, whatever that means.
Also, Babelfish kinda sucks at producing natural-sounding translations. Google gives me "Blame the spoon will be Chinese food." See how much clearer that is?
The Chinese text on the banner (can1 ting1) is simply a generic term for "dining hall" or "cafeteria", which makes this even funnier.
Get the rope.
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.
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.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/imaginepaolo/2691795861/in/pool-badtranslations/ This is all so funny. :D