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.

Cookie

I can't wait to read the fortune cookies.

Re:Cookie

Fortune cookies are an American invention. They're as unknown in China as Chop Suey.

Re:Cookie

How do we know its a resturant?

I thought it would be more likely a computer repair shop.

In the words of the immortal Jimmy James

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.

Re:In the words of the immortal Jimmy James

A News Radio reference on Slashdot...awesome. One of the most underrated shows in recent memory.

Anyone who has ever used Babelfish to translate any random phrase from their own language to any other language and back again should know better than to trust a web-based translator to give anything other than a very rough idea of what any given piece of text actually says. To use them in place of an actual human translator for tasks like the one in the article (or rather, the picture) is madness.

My Personal Favorite

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."

Great, but it is not...

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"

Re:Great, but it is not...

You remind me of KFC's "We do chicken right" being translated (by others, not official, I think) to "We are prostitutes and that's right!" ("chicken" being the slang for prostitutes).

Re:Great, but it is not...

The Chevy Nova one is an urban legend. Straight from snopes.com
Assuming that Spanish speakers would naturally see the word "nova" as equivalent to the phrase "no va" and think "Hey, this car doesn't go!" is akin to assuming that English speakers woud spurn a dinette set sold under the name Notable because nobody wants a dinette set that doesn't include a table

Also from Snope on the "Bite the Wax Tadpole"
This representation literally translated as "to allow the mouth to be able to rejoice," but it acceptably represented the concept of "something palatable from which one receives pleasure."

The other ones are unconfirmed and seem to exist mainly on sites the quote urban legends as facts.

No, those are myths

Snopes.com debunks the Chevy Nova myth [snopes.com] and the Coke-tadpole story [snopes.com]. I've never heard of the other two, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were bunk as well.

Developer failure

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should also internationalise your error messages.

Re:Developer failure

Mine are all in Spanish, the official and future language of the United States, and therefore, all of the world. It's the Spanish exposition.

Re:Developer failure

Nobody expects the Spanish exposition!

(But admit it, you were all expecting that line, weren't you.)

"Fuck goods"

Another classic that you may or may not have heard of is "fuck goods [google.com]".

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.

let's have some fun

+1 Funny to the first one who can use DNS cache poisoning [slashdot.org] to trick a Beijing restaurant into calling itself the "Free Tibet Cafe".

Re:let's have some fun

A moderation that doesn't add anything to my karma in exchange for causing a major international incident? Sold!

From a printer in Mexico...

I get tons of jobs with broken English, and when trying to fix them, I get berated, because "cousin Pancho lives in the US since 1980, and that's how he says it's written". I just let it be, and casually mention it's wrong, but what do I know? After all, I'm just an amateur grammar nazi with access to countless online dictionaries! Let them keep selling "blanckets" instead of blankets, "abandon" the hotel instead of checking out, and "get your kitchen stoned" instead of buying marble furniture. I guess bad translations are meant to be part of the tourist experience.

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!

Re:From a printer in Mexico...

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!

Maybe they do more than sell cars?

Cheap-ass Chinese

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 [theatlantic.com]. 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.

Re:Cheap-ass Chinese

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.

Free International Advertising

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.

If like you like this sort of thing..

(and I do), I'm sure you'll appreciate

http:://www.engrish.com [http]

Interesting nomenclature...

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.

Re:That is funny, but

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 [wikipedia.org]

Re:Even when it works...

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?