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funny mistranslations


li3wei1

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I don't think there is any Photoshop involved. I've seen most of these for myself. Some are very common. And what does it matter if they aren't all in China? They are still mistranslations from Chinese.

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It is not for me to mock the errors made by non-native English speaking people trying to use my language. Given the regular mangling I bring to their language, it would be hypocritical at best.

 

Most of these mistakes are from crappy computer translation software. The 'fuck' - 'dry' confusion came from an early version one of the first translation sites to be popular in China. It listed the slang meaning before the standard, and no one reads beyond the first definition.

 

Others have similar provenances. 

 

The 'crap' instead of 'carp' is a common type of error. I've met few Chinese people who can spell 'modern'. It nearly always comes out as 'modren'.  And 'true' as 'ture'.

 

Some errors (not in the article linked to) are just fostered by malicious foreigners. By far the most visited entry on my blog is this. Ai Weiwei even contacted me to ask for permission to use the picture in a Berlin exhibition catalogue.

But my all-time favourite has to be this restaurant name. Tianjin, as I recall.

 

tse.JPG

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