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.

Developer failure

[BiggerIsBetter]

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

Re:In the words of the immortal Jimmy James

[eln]

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.

Free International Advertising

[Shade of Pyrrhus]

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.

Re:Cheap-ass Chinese

[bornwaysouth]

No. The Chinese are having to do things cheaply because they have low wages. A babelfish translator is probably better than an English-speaking Chinese kid. This is because you should translate from your second language into the culture you are competent in. A Chinese-American who knows what people are looking for in a restaurant is optimal. After all, translating the Chinese for 'inexpensive' to 'dirt cheap' is correct, but even a multilingual kid might not pick up on the nuances. Beijing have supposedly removed dog off the menus for the duration of the Games. So how would they interpret someone asking for a 'Hot dog'. Call over the English speaking kid who would explain that the government had banned them.

There are possibly, a horde of examples of Americans badly translating into Chinese. You know, 'Server Translation Error' becoming 'Waiter moving sideways badly'. You have to say to yourself, I do not know about them. Possibly because I am incompetent in the languages of China, but it also could be because the Chinese may regard stuff ups like these worth relating over a drink, but not to be published to the world. It is impolite.

What I do recognize from the "Server Translation Error" is my own experience on a Help Desk when the regular guy was absent and I as junior programmer took over. I had to explain to clients what the error messages meant. Often, they meant we had not caught the error early enough, and the real explanation for say "Your registration is out of date" was that one of the networked databases had failed to update. At times the error messages totally flummoxed us. They had been there so long, without being reported, that we no longer knew they existed.

The humor I take from this is a rueful, 'Been there; Done that.'

Re:Even when it works...

[AaxelB]

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?

Re:Cheap-ass Chinese

[Spy Handler]

are you kidding me? Japanese have some of the horriblest English translation ever.

All your base are belong to us, white man!

Re:Developer failure

[Jim Hall]

I remember reading in a blog (I think Elyse Sewell's blog [livejournal.com] but I can't find the reference there at the moment) that shops in China don't really care if the English translation is correct or incorrect. What matters to them is that English is on the sign/menu. Having Chinese and a European language on your stuff makes you seem "international" or something.

The English text might say "Translation server error" or something else clearly wrong. But like 90% of your local clientele won't know the English anyway. To them, they just care that there's also English on the sign, so you must be an important place and they should go there.

I think it works the same way here in the States. Answer this honestly: let's say you're on a business trip in a strange city, and you want some Chinese food. You have two Chinese restaurants to pick from: one simply says "Chan's Chinese restaurant", the other says "Yan's Chinese restaurant" and has a bunch of Chinese characters on the sign, as well. Which do you go to? I'll bet you pick the second one, even though you have no idea what the Chinese characters mean - they could say "Stupid Americans eat here."

Re:Cookie

[eikonos]

I tried to translate that chinese text and all I got was "translate server error".