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.
Cookie (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cookie (Score:5, Informative)
Fortune cookies are an American invention. They're as unknown in China as Chop Suey.
Re:Cookie (Score:5, Informative)
Not completely. They're actually of Japanese origin, though sort of a re-adaptation by 19th-century Japanese immigrants of a somewhat different fortune cookie.
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.)
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New York City?! (Score:5, Funny)
Get the rope.
Re:New York City?! (Score:5, Informative)
It's "get a rope"
What's funny is that I read somewhere that Paces headquarters are in Jersey :).
Ahh the power of branding.
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Are you sure the city wasn't San Francisco?
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> Not completely
Ok, though, in my experience, the other part is true - ie that they're unheard of in China (well, my experience is mainly of Beijing, but still).
Re:Cookie (Score:5, Funny)
How do we know its a resturant?
I thought it would be more likely a computer repair shop.
Re:Cookie (Score:5, Informative)
because the chinese next to it says it's a resturant
In the words of the immortal Jimmy James (Score:5, Funny)
The original title of this book was 'Jimmy James, Capitalist Lion Tamer' but I see now that it's... 'Jimmy James, Macho Business Donkey Wrestler'... you know what it is... I had the book translated in to Japanese then back in again into English. Macho Business Donkey Wrestler... well there you go... it's got kind of a ring to it don't it? Anyway, I wanted to read from chapter three... which is the story of my first rise to financial prominence... I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street... many days no business come to my hut... my hut... but Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no. I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo... dung. ...Glorious sunset of my heart was fading. Soon the super karate monkey death car would park in my space. But Jimmy has fancy plans... and pants to match. The monkey clown horrible karate round and yummy like cute small baby chick would beat the donkey.
Re:In the words of the immortal Jimmy James (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Crazy? Does not have EC is their Sparta.
My Personal Favorite (Score:5, Funny)
The grandmother of an extremely attractive young lady in Toronto used Chinese characters in a design she embroidered on one of the girl's shirts. Somebody in Chinatown eventually pointed out to her that the characters said, "This dish is inexpensive but delicious."
Re:My Personal Favorite (Score:5, Funny)
Good thing it wasn't a tattoo.
Re:My Personal Favorite (Score:5, Funny)
Shit happens:
http://offbeatink.com/tattoo-designs/chinese-tattoos-gone-wrong/ [offbeatink.com]
Re:My Personal Favorite (Score:5, Funny)
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
Great, but it is not... (Score:5, Funny)
It is not a gaff like, Chevy Nova in South America, No va meaning No go, but that could be truth in advertising. Or, "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken" being translated into, "It takes a hard man to make a chicken aroused."
Some others:
"It won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you." translating into "It won't leak in your pocket and make you pregnant."
Pepsi's "Come Alive With the Pepsi Generation" translated into "Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back From the Grave" in Chinese.
The Coca-Cola name in China was first read as "Kekoukela", meaning "Bite the Wax Tadpole"
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Chevy Nova in South America, No va meaning No go, but that could be truth in advertising.
Although that one is a well-traveled urban legend, I can say from experience that referring to the Chevy Nova as "no go" would indeed be truth in advertising.
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:5, Funny)
You remind me of KFC's "We do chicken right" being translated (by others, not official, I think) to "We are prostitutes and that's right!" ("chicken" being the slang for prostitutes).
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> "We do chicken right"
I wonder what it is translated into English.
Another one : "Think different"
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Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:5, Funny)
Not a translation error per se, but something akin. Appartently someone at the Swedish property management company Locum came up with the idea to turn the 'o' in to a heart, to make the logo look trendy. The 'L' in the logo being lowercase, the logo read
I [heart] cum
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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
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:5, Informative)
The Chevy Nova one is an urban legend. Straight from snopes.com
Assuming that Spanish speakers would naturally see the word "nova" as equivalent to the phrase "no va" and think "Hey, this car doesn't go!" is akin to assuming that English speakers woud spurn a dinette set sold under the name Notable because nobody wants a dinette set that doesn't include a table
Also from Snope on the "Bite the Wax Tadpole"
This representation literally translated as "to allow the mouth to be able to rejoice," but it acceptably represented the concept of "something palatable from which one receives pleasure."
The other ones are unconfirmed and seem to exist mainly on sites the quote urban legends as facts.
Re: (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
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:5, Informative)
Nova means the exact same thing in Spanish as it does in English. It very much is a word.
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:5, Informative)
and both Spanish and English are Latin derivatives.
English is a Germanic language [wikipedia.org] and is not (closely) related to Latin or the other italic languages.
It is, however, heavily influenced by Latin [wikipedia.org], French [wikipedia.org] and Spanish [wikipedia.org].
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Read the snopes article, I merely quoted a VERY small part of it to accentuate the silliness of thinking Nova means "No go".
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:5, Informative)
"nova" actually isn't a word in Spanish (although novate/novase is a reflexive verb that is probably never used)
My copy of the Diccionario esencial de la lengua española, published by the Real Academia Española, lists
nova Astr. estrella nova
novar Der. Sustituir con una obligación otra otorgada anteriormente, la cual queda anulada en este acto.
So there's the class of stars, and a legal term to do with substituting obligations.
There are a few other words starting nova-, but I can't find a verb novarse, noverse or novirse - nóvate and nóvase can't be imperatives of the same verb.
PS I would have used definition lists, but the /. support for them seems to be broken to bits.
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Accent is the key here.
With fake acute signs, the accents would look like this:
Nova : Nóva
No va: Nová
The two sound totally different to a Spanish speaker.
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The Coca-Cola name in China was first read as "Kekoukela", meaning "Bite the Wax Tadpole"
Bullshit urban legends. Citations?
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:5, Informative)
I don't have a citation but I do speak decent Mandarin and have discussed this specific matter with Chinese people in China.
A rudimentary character by character translation gives you can-mouth-can-happy. When you put the first two characters together they mean delicious. When you put the last two characters together it just means cola. It is a transliteration. So there was an attempt to make it sound similar to the English name but also to for the actual meaning of it to indicate that it tastes good.
Anyone Chinese person that can read or has ever seen Coca-cola in China could confirm this. The idea that an enormous multi-national corporation would be so careless as to unknowingly name their flagship product "Bite the Wax Tadpole" is just absurd on it's face. Do you have any idea how much time, effort, care, and money goes into the branding of a product like that?
If the rest of those examples are even close to as stupid as that one was you can rest assured there is not truth in them at all.
---
On an unrelated note, in previewing this I realized that Slashdot defaults to using latin 1 for its encoding and I thus can't add in Chinese characters. That was kind of a surprise. I wonder if there is a way to get around that and type in other languages.
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.
No, those are myths (Score:5, Informative)
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What's funny is that, Spanish grammar being different from English grammar, "no va" doesn't just mean "no go", but literally translates as "it DOES NOT go", which is a very clear statement, lol.
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:4, Funny)
A girlfriend of my sister once asked somebody for a light in Spain on vacation. Not knowing the Spanish word, she used the German "Feuer?" which pronounces almost exactly like "follar", which means "to fuck." Hilarity ensued.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Great, but it is not... (Score:5, Informative)
"Ride the Walrus!" is the slogan for Fishy Joe's Extreme Walrus Juice.
"Whimmy wham wham wozzle!" - Slurm MacKenzie's catchphrase, is probably the closest you can get to a Slurm slogan.
And don't even get me started on Bachelor Chow...
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*ahem* Sorry. I think my Lightspeed Underwear were on too tight.
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Big Pink. It's the only gum with the breath-freshening power of ham - and, it pinkens your teeth as you chew!
Developer failure (Score:5, Insightful)
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In Korea I saw a street sign saying (something like) "exit roap this way". In Malaysia a place where you can pick your own strawberries advertises "Self Plucking".
Re:Developer failure (Score:5, Funny)
Mine are all in Spanish, the official and future language of the United States, and therefore, all of the world. It's the Spanish exposition.
Re:Developer failure (Score:5, Funny)
Nobody expects the Spanish exposition!
(But admit it, you were all expecting that line, weren't you.)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You just exposited the Spanish expectation.
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Re:Developer failure (Score:4, Funny)
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'better' is something to do with the women, right?
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Bad argument. French pr0n is much better than anything Spanish.
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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
"Fuck goods" (Score:5, Funny)
Another classic that you may or may not have heard of is "fuck goods [google.com]".
Due to simplification of Chinese characters, the words "dry" and a "do" merged into one single simplified Chinese character. In slang, "do" can mean copulation. The correct translation is "dried goods". You can see the rest yourself.
let's have some fun (Score:5, Funny)
Re:let's have some fun (Score:5, Funny)
A moderation that doesn't add anything to my karma in exchange for causing a major international incident? Sold!
Actually, incidents did happen due to translation (Score:3, Interesting)
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+1 Funny to the first one who can use DNS cache poisoning [slashdot.org] to trick a Beijing restaurant into calling itself the "Free Tibet Cafe".
Wouldn't that just describe a monastery that gives away coffee?
From a printer in Mexico... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, and if you live in San Diego and you come to a car dealership where they give you a "Leash Agreement" instead of a Lease one, tell them I said hi!
Re:From a printer in Mexico... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, and if you live in San Diego and you come to a car dealership where they give you a "Leash Agreement" instead of a Lease one, tell them I said hi!
Maybe they do more than sell cars?
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Another of my English product highlights was a label for play money. I was given creative freedom, so I did it as if I was writing Engrish. I came up with "Little Millionaire's Play Money: Financial Fun!" The client LOVED it with fanatical glee!
Alte
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.
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.
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A year ago, I spent a few weeks in Hanoi. Both "carp" and "crab" were commonly available in the restaurants, but both were frequently spelled "crap" on the menu.
Re:Cheap-ass Chinese (Score:4, Insightful)
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: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.
Re:Cheap-ass Chinese (Score:5, Insightful)
All your base are belong to us, white man!
Re:Cheap-ass Chinese (Score:5, Funny)
No Ad Men On /. Obviously That restaraunt is sitting on a fortune if they are smart enough NOT to take that sign down. The word is out, on slashdot no less, the world will flock to them.
I have spoken
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Well, if the English isn't meant for English people, then who cares what it says. IMO it makes sense to make it as cheaply as possible. I would expect it wasn't they who translated it anyway, but one of the many dirt-cheap printing shops you get along pretty much any street.
Anyway...."a hundred yuan"...??? Are you *mad*? You clearly have no idea how much labour costs are in China. Ten Yuan is much more likely.
Free International Advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
If like you like this sort of thing.. (Score:5, Informative)
(and I do), I'm sure you'll appreciate
http:://www.engrish.com [http]
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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. :)
Interesting nomenclature... (Score:5, Funny)
I have a street map of Kyoto with a legend translating the Japanese for "WC" into English - "Cornhole Palace".
Something tells me that wasn't entirely accidental.
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.
Re:Even when it works... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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it took me a wee while to catch on to yir lingo and actually until after Aaxelb explained the sentence before I realised what was being talked abooot.
But what do I know I'm Scottish... here the only things that buck are rabbits and deer :) I really thought an 'of' was missing someplace. I'm guessing the first statement however is also missing either a comma or colon with the number?
1 Buck a scoop: Chinese food
meh, fook it!
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I like that; it works for me. You can tell I'm a rather mathematical person... I tend to use a lot of parentheses. The idea of using them to keep the meaning clear is great. I wonder if we could optimize software (and web) translators by including this method in them.
Wtf is "Buck a scoop Chinese food." (Score:2)
It's not like I understand it, how can we expect the software to understand what it means?
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
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Chinese fonts have thousands of characters. They also include all the standard European ones. Unfortunately, whatever the
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When the printer or layout person doesn't read English, they just make it fit. The customer often doesn't care either, it's just boilerplate to them.
Re:That is funny, but (Score:5, Informative)
Well, pre-unicode chinese "wide" (multiple-byte, but actually typically wider on screen too, due to the higher level of detail required to convey chinese ideograms) charsets like Big5 and GB still included "fullwidth" latin characters (fullwidth: double the width of normal latin characters, so that they fit in "better" with chinese ideograms at that width). Actually, unicode encodes them too, for backward compatibility (adding to URL-spoofing problems).
These fullwidth "latin" letters are at different code points to normal ASCII!
The chinese tend to decide the fullwidth forms look "better" with serifs (more stylistically compatible with their ideograms), so they almost always have serifs, and since they're not (well,the "fullwidth" ones anyway) at the same encoding points as "real" latin characters, changing the latin font tends not to change the chinese-"latin" "fullwidth" characters, so they keep looking like the same old serif forms from the chinese font. So even with the best of intentions, it tends to be difficult to get rid of the ugly old serif characters when localising something originally produced in china, especially if the work isn't being done by a total computer geek who has a hope of understanding what's going on when he selects the fullwidth latin characters and changing the font doesn't work as expected.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fullwidth [wikipedia.org]
They should Bite the Wax Tadpole... (Score:2)
No. Myth. (Score:2)
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
Mistake? Or Clever Marketing? (Score:2)
Perhaps those Chinese restauranteurs are smarter than we think!
Now every geek across the world has heard of the Translate Server Error cafe, and the five of us that get out of our mom's basement and head to China for the Olympics are definitely going to look for this place and try it.
Blocked (Score:2, Interesting)
Even more fail than it looks (Score:5, Informative)
The Chinese text on the banner (can1 ting1) is simply a generic term for "dining hall" or "cafeteria", which makes this even funnier.
Re: (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.
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...
For a good analysis... (Score:5, Informative)
Check out Language Log [upenn.edu]. They do not only have even funnier examples, but also try to analyze the source of the error, as well as translation problems in other languages. The latest installment in the series of Chinese-English mistranslations is The Sichuan's hair blood is prosperous [upenn.edu], or check the whole category: Lost in Translation [upenn.edu].
They also collect "Cupertinos", errors introduced by spelling checkers, or have you ever heard of US presidential candidates Barrack Abeam and John moccasin? It's a great log for anyone interested in language.
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".
Same Error - Different place. (Score:5, Interesting)
At least they are trying: (Score:3, Interesting)
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Hint: It begins with sucking and ends with cock :-)
Your one-stop shop for bad Hanzi/Kanji tattoos... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.hanzismatter.com/ [hanzismatter.com].
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Haven't you seen their t-shirts? They invariably have non-sense English printed on them. I think such t-shirts might well be popular in the west.
I wonder if people will go to this restaurant just because of the error. It could become a clever marketing trick. They could sell t-shirts :)
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O rly? That must be why this was posted in the Entertainment section, then.