My salt’s got a Chinese pagoda on it now. And some Arabic, for good measure.
Category: We Love Translations
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Man child, age 6
I would like to point out that this is hilarious. From a certain angle.
From another angle, it is also evidence of a good deal of hard work and bravery on the part of the parent…
Imagine you’ve just moved to another country with your wife and son and you have to function in another language, one that you’ve studied but that you didn’t grow up with. Furthermore imagine that it is one that uses a writing system totally different from your own and contains combinations of sounds you can’t accurately pronounce.
You’re going to send your son to a school that uses your family’s language, but you want him to study the local language, too. You go to a private education provider and find a class suitable for your son’s age and language ability level. You decide to register him for classes there.
Then they give you a form to fill out. It’s not in your language.
Even if it were, nobody likes filling out forms.
Or should you say, filling them in? Or up? Why does English have all these pesky phrasal verbs anyway?
You do your best with the form.
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Siddhartha is a rambling quest for enlightenment with many mistakes and revelations along the way. It’s a classic, but it’s not really my kind of thing.
You can get it free from Gutenberg, but I would recommend buying it so that you get the benefit of a good translation.
When and why I read it
I wanted to download something free from Gutenberg to read on my Kindle while on a trip to Bangkok. This book was recommended to me by a neighbor in New Jersey several years ago.
Genre: fiction (literature & classics); religion and spirituality
Date started / date finished: 05-Mar-16 to 05-Mar-16
Length: 98 pages
Originally published in: 1922 in German
Amazon link: Siddhartha
Gutenberg link: Siddhartha
“Related” books
- Buddhism Explained by Laurence-Khantipalo Mills
- I have at least one other book on Buddhism…
Mind your b’s and d’s
This sign should say ‘Pork Rib Rice’. The fact that it doesn’t proves that it’s not just children learning to read who confuse the letters ‘b’ and ‘d’.
EKIT
Oops.
It’s not like English needs the letter X anyway. Anything with an X in it could be spelled with some other letter or letters, usually ‘ks’ or ‘z’.
Of course, it’s possible to go too far in trying to simplify English spelling. It’s pretty much impossible not to, in fact, which is why no one since Noah Webster has really succeeded. (You have him to thank—or curse—for most of the differences between American and British spelling.)
Please be understood.
I spotted this hilarious Engrish sign at Book Mart at The Central. It is (I assume) not a joke but rather the best translation they could manage.
Thank you for usually favoring it more. This time I will perform store remodeling construction in the following schedule. I am so sorry, but a store is closed until November 3. I really trouble it, but it, please be understood.
I think it means:
Dear customers, thank you for your continued support. The shop will be closed for remodeling until November 3. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.
If you are looking for a better translation for “please be understood,” consider:
Thank you for understanding.
Thank you for your understanding.
Thank you for your kind understanding.
Did you know?
Five times more people are learning English in China than there are people in England.
Wow.
Signaling tense and aspect
Chinese does not have ‘grammar’ the way European languages do because words are not inflected. There are no plurals, noun cases or past tense. All the memorization of declensions you have to do when you study, say, Germanic, Slavic and Romance languages—that kind of stuff is absent from Chinese entirely (though you would of course be foolish to conclude that Chinese is therefore easy). So how are the relationships between words indicated? Context, adverbs and particles.
Let’s look at verb tense (specifically past tense) and aspect (specifically completed aspect) in Singlish as influenced by Chinese.
Why Chinese is hard
This is an articulate, entertaining, informative essay about Mandarin Chinese. You should read it if you are a Westerner living in Asia, if you are considering studying Chinese, if you liked the TV show Firefly, or if you have ever had any contact with one or more Chinese people from China. It will give you perspective.
Pinyin.info:
Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard
I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn’t remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 “to sneeze”. I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment.
In other words, the difficulty of the Chinese writing system makes the language hard for native speakers, too. Remember that next time you’re complaining about how ‘arbitrary’ English spelling is.
English spelling is crazy.
It’s been done to death, but here it is again.
Someone (though probably not the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who wrote Pygmalion, which later became a musical named My Fair Lady) joked that the word ‘fish’ can be spelled ‘ghoti’.
- Take the ‘gh’ from ‘laugh’
- Add the ‘o’ from ‘women’
- Add the ‘ti’ from ‘nation’
And you get ‘ghoti’, pronounced ‘fish’.
More details at the wikipedia page for ‘ghoti’.
