My favorite two bits of Engrish from when I lived in Japan:
I saw a kid wearing a shirt that said “Crap your hands!” (Meaning, I can only assume or at least hope, “Clap your hands”.
I saw a manhole cover brand labeled “Husky Manhole”
MODEL AEROPLANE IS FRESH AND EXCITING
(T-shirt worn by tough guy in Hong Kong.)
Front: FUCK YOU
Reverse: YOU FUCKING FUCK
(T-shirt worn by cute little old lady in China.)
Having seen a store name traslated as something like “Error 404” leads me to believe that there is a trusting dependence on Internet translaters.
And yet, still a cool name for a trendy clothes store or night club…
Here is an explanation of how one specific piece of Chinglish got as bad as it did. ‘Benumbed hot vegetables fries fuck silk’ makes sense in context.
Here is an explanation of why ‘fuck’ is so common in Chinglish. In short, GAN4 probably should be translated as ‘do’ and GAN1, ‘dry’.
Well it appears my search for the perfect gay bar name is over.
Once I was asked by some family friends to vet a young girl’s t-shirts before she took off on a one-year homestay to Canada.
I had to put aside four or five t-shirts, on the grounds that they were not appropriate to wear around town in an English speaking community.
I’m not an expert but I think that the phrase “Fuck Buddies” is not the best thing to have in bold-red diagonal lettering on the long-sleeve t-shirt of an 18 year old girl who has no idea what that means.
I’ve often wondered who is responsible for putting such phrases on t-shirts. It’s not ‘Engrish’ per se, but it’s innapropriate enough to be classified as Engrish.
You want random words? When I was in Japan in 1998, I saw a van (or maybe an SUV) that had a large logo that said MU on the back. As I got closer, I realized that I was just seeing the large caps on the model name which was: Mysterious Utility. You can say that again.
Something similar happened in 2008 with a Welsh translation.
I like to imagine a secret coterie of people who got burned out on trying to teach English and decided to make the people they couldn’t teach look as foolish as possible.
Random English, or random Latin letters, is one thing. Putting “DIARRHOEA feces are discharged from bowels frequently” on a woman’s shirt indicates a deranged intellect.
I always wondered if there were equivalent Chinese websites making fun of western tatoos or the like.
For my work in subtitles, I deal with text in different languages daily. Before Google Translate came along, we had no way of verifying translations without the help of a language speaker; we had to trust that the translations we were sent by email were valid.
A few years ago, we were subtitling a movie that had a short title, and the Greek title translation we received was kinda long. This in itself isn’t necessarily cause for concern, as other languages sometimes make a roundabout translation-- what is “My Dog Sam” in English can be translated as “The Spontaneous Adventures of a Mischievous Canine in a Big City” in another language. So we implemented this long Greek title and delivered the file to the client.
A couple months later, the file came back, with a note asking us to replace the long title with a more appropriately short one. Turns out the Greek fellow who sent the long text was actually asking, “Could you give me more information on this film? I don’t know much about it,” but because he wrote it in Greek and either no one read it or checked it, it almost made it to the master disc.
I did in fact make the joke that it was all Greek to me.
I just bought a Canon Printer. The 33 page manual is printed in 27 (!) languages including Greek characters, three Slavic languages in Cyrilic, two languages with Japanese type characters, and two Arabic character languages (probably Arab and Iranian).
English and French are perfect.
Did Canon have to hire 27 translators ? I think they had the better sense to just submit the text to professional translators.
That’s a good one. “Nhan” in Vietnamese means filling. So “banh bao nhan (thit)” is a meat-filled bun. However, nhan could mean person in certain contexts, so I can see how someone looking up the words one by one could end up with “human dumpling”.
On the other hand, I see a lot of laziness too. There are dictionaries and English-speaking people available in the big cities. There’s also the Internet connecting anyone to forums like this one where native speakers would be only too pleased to answer questions. There’s no excuse for a misspelled word (for example) on a two-word sign.
I’m more worried about the Engrish coming out of actual English-speaking countries. For example, I recently saw here in Australia, at a chain store owned by a major corporation, this written as the title on the side of a box of their in-house furniture brand: “3-draw nightstand.”
:smack:
I work in retail and I’m constantly receiving promotional material from wholesalers in China.
They produce literature that is really well laid out, with great photos and cutting edge design.
But the English is absolutely terrible and completely mangled. And these are huge companies who are selling, say, $3000 carbon fiber bicycle frames. It’s beyond me.
What I don’t understand is why the don’t simply go outside, find the nearest English speaker and say, “Here. Read this. Is this correct?”
The only thing I can think of is that they simply have no idea how idiotic they look. In the end, I’m reluctant to buy their products if they don’t have the sense to have their literature properly edited.
It’s the “Debbie in accounts studied X-language at university, let’s ask her!” phenomenon.
They’d rather trust someone they know, than a native speaker. And because they know nothing about translation, they don’t realize how important it is to have a native speaker.
In Japan, it’s considerably worse because of the mistrust of foreigners.
According to UN guidelines, translators working in the UN are only allowed to translate into their mother tongue (for example, Japanese translators should only only do English to Japanese, E-to-J).
However, over in the United Nations University in Shibuya, every time new foreign managers and academics are brought in, there is huge fight over only Japanese translators doing J-to-E translations in direct violation of UN rules.
I see.
I wonder if there is a service opportunity here?
Set up a desk in an office somewhere in China and say, “Bring me your drafts and I’ll fix them in two seconds so you don’t look like a doofus.”