I’ve always gotten a kick of of foreign-manufactured products that screw up when they translate their packaging or instructions into English. A while back I bought an airsoft gun, and the instructions—complete with goofy cartoons—had the following warning:
“Not for be shoot pet friend in eye! Googles wear at many times!”
Obligatory link to Engrish.
-I don’ t missing you.
-It has been to SAPPORO. It is the excellent piece chosen for you this t-shirt is [ you ] a souvinir.
-Pink Power. Get a Clue. Sneaky Pink. So Sly. Think Pink. Pink Pow.
All from clothing.
I have a cooler pad for my laptop. Its product description on the box was in several languages; I could tell that the original language was Spanish, it had been translated from Spanish to English and then from English to the other languages.
You see, the Spanish and English were correct. But in every other language, the translators had treated “cooler” not as “thing that cools” but as “thing which is more cold;” they also didn’t seem to understand “overheating.” So yeah, in Italian, French, German etc you would be buying “a more cold base that keeps your laptop from heating high.”
From the compilation of Consumer Resports “Selling It” columns comes the story of a badly translated instruction manual. The intended word was “screw”, as in screw the bolt in the socket. You can guess what synonym the Japanese company used instead.
But did they use the copula verb correctly?
Also from engrish funny.
??
In a magazine rack in a shop in LA’s Little Tokyo, I saw what appeared to be a men’s magazine, subtitled “Intelligent Shower for Men.”
Copula verb is another term for what you may know as a linking verb. The word copula is related to copulation, which is sometimes referred to as “screwing” (or the more vulgar synonym to which you alluded).
If you haven’t already seen it, check out the weekly sign language feature from the telegraph. They aren’t all mistranslations, but they are all hilarious.