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.
Cheap-ass Chinese (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Even when it works... (Score:3, Interesting)
Its funny; things just don't translate cleanly.
take:
Buck a scoop Chinese food.
babel it and you get:
é'æS--ç"äåoeäé£Yç©
babel it again and you get:
Resists stubbornly wooden scoop Chinese food
yummy.
That is funny, but (Score:4, Interesting)
That is pretty funny, but without the server error I've found chinese translators (traditional and simplified han) to work better than most languages. I was going to find a funny mistranslation, but my systran translator worked flawlessly. The worst I could find with my original subject line, "that was pretty funny," was, "that was quite funny."
The situation is worse with longer or more complex sentences and turns of phrase, but I was surprised at the level of sophistication of modern machine translation. This story should really be making fun of whatever server the translator was running on rather than the cafe owner or the translator itself.
What I find interesting about printed chinese english is that it is often printed in the same typeface. Look at many of the inspection tags, instructions, or 'made in china' tags that you have on products laying about; chances are that they are all in an identical old-fashioned serif typeface. Can anyone tell us the story behind this generic 'english' typeface that I run into so often?
-b
Just 1 litte problem.... (Score:2, Interesting)
my chinese isn't good enough to confirm that it actually is a translation error...
for all i know, it's an accurate translation
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:2, Interesting)
That's a very bad analogy by Snopes. Although "nova" doesn't necessarily equal "no va" which means "it doesn't go", "nova" actually isn't a word in Spanish (although novate/novase is a reflexive verb that is probably never used) and upon hearing it, a Spanish speaker would assume (and they did) that it means "no va". The English "notable" is already a word with a different meaning and different pronunciation.
As far as "bite the wax tadpole" is concerned, well, I just like that better anyway. They should make that the American version.
Re:Cheap-ass Chinese (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Blocked (Score:2, Interesting)
if only they can see it (Score:2, Interesting)
just talked to someone in China (Xian), and he told me he couldn't get to it...
Re:Even more fail than it looks (Score:2, Interesting)
Any chance can1 ting1 is a "phonetic" "translation" of the English word canteen? Just a guess--my Cantonese-speaking in-laws have exposed me to a fair number of "Chinese" words that are just sound-alikes based on either English or French so the similarity made me wonder.
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:4, Interesting)
I can confirm this. In addition, if you put the last two characters together (kele), it literally means "joyful", and pronounces like "Cola".
"Bite the Wax Tadpole" is irrelevent. "Keko-kele" does not mean that, not even part of that.
Chinese is like Perl, which is highly context-sensitive. Most characters mean complete different things in different context. So there are characters that work just like sigils in order to disambiguous them. And people have to use delimiters carefully.
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:3, Interesting)
> "We do chicken right"
I wonder what it is translated into English.
Another one : "Think different"
far from the first time (Score:3, Interesting)
And it's not like this is only a problem going to English, we have committed some blunders, there are many stories how Pepsi's "Come alive, You're in the Pepsi Generation" translated to something in Chinese like "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead".
Apparently some do it intentionally (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently some people intentionally buy and wear stuff like that. As anecdote I present the Baka Gainjin [jbox.com] (Stupid Foreigner) t-shirt. I don't know how many they sold, but since after all these years they still sell it... :P
Same Error - Different place. (Score:5, Interesting)
At least they are trying: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cookie (Score:2, Interesting)
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.)
Burritos are from northern Mexico, where the tortillas are made from wheat.
In 1998, Peter Fox traced the origins [blogspot.com] of the burrito the state of Sonora in northern Mexico, and sent these audio reports [peterfoxmusic.com] to NPR.
Sobre gustos no hay disputas
Re:Cheap-ass Chinese (Score:4, Interesting)
Beijing have supposedly removed dog off the menus for the duration of the Games.
In Korea they 'permanently' solved the problem by forbidding restaurants that serve dog from using English to advertise the menu option at all.
Actually, incidents did happen due to translation (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:3, Interesting)
So I guess you haven't heard of SQL (sequel) or EBCIDIC (ebb-si-dic) or ASCII (ask-eee) .... well, you get the idea.
Layne
Snopes missed something important. (Score:1, Interesting)
Snopes doesn't do too bad of a job there with the myth of the Chevrolet Nova [snopes.com], but they just miss the most glaring problem with the story: who would seriously believe that Spanish speakers would avoid buying a foreign car just because its name would be a pun for "no go" in Spanish? It's like the Americans who believe this story also believe that Spanish speakers are all stupid simpletons. (Hmmm, I might be on to something there...)
It is true, as Snopes points out, that the normal way to describe in Spanish a car that doesn't work would be something like "no funciona," "no marcha" or "no camina," and not "no va." However, you can also be pretty sure that, more than once, the hapless owner of a broken down Chevy Nova has jokingly described it with a pun: "Mi Nova no va"; "Tengo que vender el Nova y comprarme un Siva" (I gotta sell my "no-go" and buy a "yes-go"); etc. It's like the Americans who don't believe this story also believe that Spanish speakers are all humorless literalists. (Hmmm...)
The other side of the coin (Score:3, Interesting)
For some perspective on the other side, the site Hanzi Smatter [hanzismatter.com] (run by a friend of the owner of engrish.com) has a great collection of equally high-quality use of Chinese (and Japanese and Korean) by westerners. The best part is that westerners really seem to like to use Hanzi/Kanji in tattoos; the result is a bit harder to fix than a gaffe in a manual or a sign. :)