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Recharger


roddy

745597 views

My first reaction to this sign (which is on a machine that lets you put money on your Seoul subway card, no transfer of electricity is involved) is that it was a mistranslation. But then I thought maybe it's a normal usage that I don't know about, perhaps in Japanese?

Investigate!

10 Comments


Recommended Comments

Kenny同志

Posted

It's Korean above the Chinese characters.

Kenny同志

Posted

In fact, the Chinese characters are Japanese.

jbradfor

Posted

Denshi Jisho translates 充電器 as "(battery) charger" as well, similar to what I would expect the Chinese translation to be. Doing a Google image search on "充電器 +site:.jp" brings up only pictures of battery chargers. So I'm starting to wonder if this is a mistranslation as well?

[How long will you be in Korea?]

roddy

Posted

It's Korean above the Chinese characters.

Obviously ;-)

[A matter of hours now]

Kenny同志

Posted

Are you talking to me, Jbradfor?

I am not going to go to Korea.

creamyhorror

Posted

Looks quite clearly like a mistranslation to me. I have the impression I saw the English term "recharge" used in Hong Kong to refer to adding value to the Octopus cards there, but I might be wrong. In Singapore we say "top up" and the machines are labelled, in an oddly Engrishy fashion, "Add Value Machines".

Hofmann

Posted

In fact, the Chinese characters are Japanese.

The Japanese standard 器 doesn't have a dot.

jbradfor

Posted

Are you talking to me, Jbradfor?

To roddy, since this is his second (consecutive) picture from Seoul.

[unless you're trying to be Robert De Niro?]

jbradfor

Posted

The Japanese standard 器 doesn't have a dot.

Which must also be a mistake, as the third language on the left side (after Korean and English) is clearly Japanese, not Chinese.

Glenn

Posted

The Japanese standard also doesn't have two dots on 辶 (it would be 交通 and 充電器... and I hope that displays right). It's been a while since I've been on a train in Japan, and I never had a pre-paid card, so I don't know about the usage, but I did learn a new word: 指南. Interesting... This does remind me of seeing some tea that came from Taiwan that was supposed to be for Japanese consumers -- the Japanese was written with Taiwanese 繁體字. I thought it was pretty cool. Anyway, this would probably be a case of that, since Korea never simplified the characters like China and Japan did.

I did do a search for Suica and 充電器 on Google (Suica is a pre-paid card for the public transportation in Tokyo), but it seems that they much prefer the word チャージ (chaaji) for putting more money on it, which just comes from the English "charge". So it's a bit of a mystery, I suppose, although it's probably just a translation mistake if it's a mistake at all.

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