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May182007

Join the Red Sox Army

Filed under Uncategorized by teresa santoski at 11:53 am

Do all those Japanese signs at Fenway really say what the English speakers who commissioned them think they say? Check it out over at The Boston Phoenix.

In these companies' defense, Japanese is a notoriously difficult language to master. There's three alphabets (kanji, hiragana, and katakana), and numbers change depending on what you're counting - for example, you would use one set of numerical classifiers to count bottles, another for counting sheets of paper, etc. And that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Fortunately, Japanese people can have just as hard a time with English, as seen at Engrish.com. Makes you feel a little better, doesn't it?

The Chinese also seem to possess a knack for turning the English language on its head. At one of the many airports I visited, there was an area next to our check-in counter marked "Complain the place," which I'm assuming was the complaint department for airline customers.

It's hard to be sure, though, because a few days later I encountered a telephone marked "Complaining telephone." I steered clear of it, just in case it wanted to bend my ear. Nothing worse than a whiny phone. And don't get me started on our hotel in Chongqing, where a sign in the elevator explained in great detail which "bottom" I should press in the event of an emergency.

And of course, my favorite, the Ancient Thing Store in Lhasa, Tibet. For me, it doesn't get any better than that.

For adventures in Chinese menu translation, click here. Since there are a gazillion and a half comments on this entry (yes, I counted), I'll excerpt one of the more enlightening comments here, in which a veteran China traveler explains why the f-bomb is so prominent in the English translation of the menu:

"Take #1313, “Benumbed hot vegetables fries fuck silk.” It should read “Hot and spicy garlic greens stir-fried with shredded dried tofu.” However, the mangled version above is not as mangled as it seems: it’s a literal word-by-word translation, with some cases where the translator chose the wrong one of two meanings of a word:

First two characters: “ma la” meaning hot and spicy, but literally “numbingly spicy” — it means a kind of Sichuan spice that mixes chilies with Sichuan peppercorn or prickly ash. The latter tends to numb the mouth. “Benumbed hot” is a decent, if ungrammatical, literal translation.

Next two: “jiu cai,” the top greens of a fragrant-flowering garlic. There’s no good English translation, so “vegetables” is just fine.

Next one: “chao,” meaning stir-fried, quite reasonably rendered as “fries” (should be “fried,” but that’s a distinction English makes and Chinese doesn’t).

Finally: “gan si” meaning shredded dried tofu, but literally translated as “dry silk.” The problem here is that the word “gan” means both “to dry” and “to do,” and the latter meaning has come to mean “to fuck.” Unfortunately, the recent proliferation of Colloquial English dictionaries in China means people choose the vulgar translation way too often, on the grounds that it’s colloquial. Last summer I was in a spiffy modern supermarket in Taiyuan whose dried-foods aisle was helpfully labeled “Assorted Fuck.” The word “si” meaning “silk floss” is used in cooking to refer to anything that’s been julienned — very thin pommes frites are sold as “potato silk,” for instance. The fact that it’s tofu is just understood (sheets of dried tofu shredded into julienne) — if it were dried anything else it would say so."

No matter how outlandish the translation, there's always a method to the madness. Here's hoping Japanese baseball fans are good at reading the intended meanings behind our translations, and that they have a sense of humor. 

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