Chinese Restaurant Suffers Large Translation Error 364
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.
If like you like this sort of thing.. (Score:5, Informative)
(and I do), I'm sure you'll appreciate
http:://www.engrish.com [http]
Re:Cookie (Score:5, Informative)
Fortune cookies are an American invention. They're as unknown in China as Chop Suey.
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Your one-stop shop for bad Hanzi/Kanji tattoos... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.hanzismatter.com/ [hanzismatter.com].
No, those are myths (Score:5, Informative)
Re:That is funny, but (Score:5, Informative)
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]
Even more fail than it looks (Score:5, Informative)
The Chinese text on the banner (can1 ting1) is simply a generic term for "dining hall" or "cafeteria", which makes this even funnier.
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:5, Informative)
Nova means the exact same thing in Spanish as it does in English. It very much is a word.
Re:Cookie (Score:5, Informative)
Not completely. They're actually of Japanese origin, though sort of a re-adaptation by 19th-century Japanese immigrants of a somewhat different fortune cookie.
Like the burrito, it's actually kind of wrong to treat the fortune cookie as strictly an American misconception. (Burritos are of Californian origin, it is true: but from the era when California was part of Mexico.)
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:5, Informative)
"Ride the Walrus!" is the slogan for Fishy Joe's Extreme Walrus Juice.
"Whimmy wham wham wozzle!" - Slurm MacKenzie's catchphrase, is probably the closest you can get to a Slurm slogan.
And don't even get me started on Bachelor Chow...
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:5, Informative)
I don't have a citation but I do speak decent Mandarin and have discussed this specific matter with Chinese people in China.
A rudimentary character by character translation gives you can-mouth-can-happy. When you put the first two characters together they mean delicious. When you put the last two characters together it just means cola. It is a transliteration. So there was an attempt to make it sound similar to the English name but also to for the actual meaning of it to indicate that it tastes good.
Anyone Chinese person that can read or has ever seen Coca-cola in China could confirm this. The idea that an enormous multi-national corporation would be so careless as to unknowingly name their flagship product "Bite the Wax Tadpole" is just absurd on it's face. Do you have any idea how much time, effort, care, and money goes into the branding of a product like that?
If the rest of those examples are even close to as stupid as that one was you can rest assured there is not truth in them at all.
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On an unrelated note, in previewing this I realized that Slashdot defaults to using latin 1 for its encoding and I thus can't add in Chinese characters. That was kind of a surprise. I wonder if there is a way to get around that and type in other languages.
Re:Cookie (Score:5, Informative)
because the chinese next to it says it's a resturant
For a good analysis... (Score:5, Informative)
Check out Language Log [upenn.edu]. 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 [upenn.edu], or check the whole category: Lost in Translation [upenn.edu].
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.
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:5, Informative)
"nova" actually isn't a word in Spanish (although novate/novase is a reflexive verb that is probably never used)
My copy of the Diccionario esencial de la lengua española, published by the Real Academia Española, lists
nova Astr. estrella nova
novar Der. Sustituir con una obligación otra otorgada anteriormente, la cual queda anulada en este acto.
So there's the class of stars, and a legal term to do with substituting obligations.
There are a few other words starting nova-, but I can't find a verb novarse, noverse or novirse - nóvate and nóvase can't be imperatives of the same verb.
PS I would have used definition lists, but the /. support for them seems to be broken to bits.
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:5, Informative)
and both Spanish and English are Latin derivatives.
English is a Germanic language [wikipedia.org] and is not (closely) related to Latin or the other italic languages.
It is, however, heavily influenced by Latin [wikipedia.org], French [wikipedia.org] and Spanish [wikipedia.org].
Re:New York City?! (Score:5, Informative)
It's "get a rope"
What's funny is that I read somewhere that Paces headquarters are in Jersey :).
Ahh the power of branding.
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:2, Informative)
English isn't a Romance language, it's Germanic.
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:3, Informative)
Accent is the key here.
With fake acute signs, the accents would look like this:
Nova : Nóva
No va: Nová
The two sound totally different to a Spanish speaker.