engrish.com

[Virgil Showlion]

I just discovered it during a wayward image search.

I don't know what it is about foreigners failing at the English language that I find so funny, but I haven't laughed that hard in a long time.

Some of my favourite samples thus far:

 

I could see Weltz buying this one:



I get this one from EEers all the time:



For Archie:



And for Weltz again, since her spidey sense would probably be tingling:



You guys should try a few, and add your own captions.

[Virgil Showlion]

At least they have tough laws for sex offenders.

[The Captain]

I  can say with absolute certainty that their English is much better than my mastery of their language.

[NancysSummerSip]

Hey, that's a football jersey he's wearing. How did the guy know about our NFL?

And I'm not sure if Let's Beer With Music would be a mistake. Sounds like an EE plan to me!!!!

[Virgil Showlion]

Jan 22, 2015 13:13:43 GMT -5 The Captain said:

I  can say with absolute certainty that their English is much better than my mastery of their language.

That's the point, though.

If you were going to put out a product, or in fact an entire restaurant, under a Malaysian name for example, isn't the very first thing you'd do is find somebody who was actually born, raised, and educated in Malaysia, and is moreover accredited as an expert in the language?



I mean honestly, how much would making a sign like the above cost? Several thousand dollars? And you couldn't spend maybe $80.00 to sit down with an actual English speaker for an hour to consult on whether "Poison Bakery" was a good name for your business?

[The Captain]

Virgil Showlion - I've made it a bit of a hobby to study the linkages between languages with the same latin roots - as they all have something in common.  Heck even the evolution of old English into modern English is pretty interesting.  I also have attempted to teach myself a bit of Japanese which was a dismal failure.  That fact that minute changes in the character changes the whole word isn't something I could memorize well.

Pictographic languages are fundamentally different from latin based languages.  I'm not an expert, but I suspect the very structure of how the language presents itself doesn't even allow the speak to contemplate such mistakes are even possible.

I'd love it if dannylion would weigh in on this because IIRC they are a actual linguistic expert.

[ՏՇԾԵԵʅՏɧ_LԹՏՏʅҼ]

[NancysSummerSip]

Jan 22, 2015 13:48:48 GMT -5 ՏՇԾԵԵʅՏɧ_LԹՏՏʅҼ said:

Hey, screws need love, too. (As do nuts and bolts occasionally).

[dannylion]

Sure, TC, I'd be happy to comment.  I, too, am fascinated by the amazing similarities and vast differences that exist among human languages. 

Oh, golly, where to start.  Well, first of all, the characters on the Poison Bakery sign are Korean, though I supposed the restaurant itself could have been in Malaysia. 

Anyway, it looks like most of the translation errors on the signs were the result of the rookiest of rookie translation mistakes:  Using the first definition of a word that appears in the foreign-language/English dictionary.  They could also be the result of using really, really bad machine translation program, too.  I think a lot of signs in Asian countries, at least the ones that end up on engrish.com, are prepared by people with absolutely no knowledge of the structure of English and just a small English active vocabulary.  So, they just do a one-to-one substitution from their language into English, always choosing the first definition of the English word from their foreign-language/English dictionary. They just leave the word order as it appears in the original language, which seldom matches the English word order for the same expression.  Or they just latch onto the wrong word and run with it.  Since they don't really know any English and probably don't have anyone to do a sanity check, it sort of snowballs. 

It is possible to produce a smooth translation from an Asian language into a Western European language, but it is not for the faint of heart.  The syntax of Asian languages is very different from the syntax of Western European languages.  For example, Chinese doesn't really have what we would understand as a body of grammar.  It has sentence patterns and function words.  The sentence patterns, when rendered word-for-word with English words replacing their Chinese counterparts are often incomprehensible or just plain weird.  Function words are not really something an English speaker would understand, so when they are translated as-is or as their function in the middle of an English sentence, the English speaker just goes WTF?  Function words are basically characters that are placed before or after a word or phrase to indicate the function of that word or phrase in the sentence or its relation to the words before or after it.  The characters that are function words are also words themselves which when they are not being function words are just words with meanings entirely unrelated to their meaning as function words.  So it can be challenging to the uninitiated to determine what that character is actually doing there.  Is it a word?  Is it a function word?  The same conundrum happens when turning Chinese into English.  Function words get translated or their functional syntax rendered in the translation and hilarity ensues. 

The crap/carp transposition is very common in Asian-language-to-English signs.  Languages that are written in characters do not have spelling per se, so a transposition like that is not likely to be noticed or even understood unless the person doing it is a skilled translator, which the people who do the signs often appear not to be. 

Anyway, that's a quick and dirty and probably not very coherent explanation of how I think these things happen.  I've got an appointment and will check back later. 

[Virgil Showlion]

Jan 22, 2015 13:37:39 GMT -5 The Captain said:

Virgil Showlion - I've made it a bit of a hobby to study the linkages between languages with the same latin roots - as they all have something in common.  Heck even the evolution of old English into modern English is pretty interesting.  I also have attempted to teach myself a bit of Japanese which was a dismal failure.  That fact that minute changes in the character changes the whole word isn't something I could memorize well.

Pictographic languages are fundamentally different from latin based languages.  I'm not an expert, but I suspect the very structure of how the language presents itself doesn't even allow the speak to contemplate such mistakes are even possible.

I'd love it if dannylion would weigh in on this because IIRC they are a actual linguistic expert.

That's precisely why I'd run anything I intended to publish in a foreign language though a company specializing in accurate translations. Even if software could perform a more-or-less accurate translation, or if I had an intermediate-level understanding of the language, who knows how many issues with nuance, innuendo, double entendre, arrogance, unculturedness, profanity, and plain old Murphy's Law I'd possibly run into. I'd be worried about both the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns.

Grammatically, "Our juice gets your spaz child out of scrapes!" might be a perfectly valid translation of something whose Japanese root is [Our topical cream] [causes] [Your child] [highly energetic and active] [to leave the condition of having] [abrasions of the skin]. Obviously what the writer means to say is "Treats cuts and scrapes for your active children!", but their perfectly-grammatically-valid translation is so bad that not only is it comical, an English speaker would be hard-pressed to infer the intended meaning.

[Virgil Showlion]

Jan 22, 2015 14:20:21 GMT -5 dannylion said:

Sure, TC, I'd be happy to comment.  I, too, am fascinated by the amazing similarities and vast differences that exist among human languages. 

Oh, golly, where to start.  Well, first of all, the characters on the Poison Bakery sign are Korean, though I supposed the restaurant itself could have been in Malaysia. 

Anyway, it looks like most of the translation errors on the signs were the result of the rookiest of rookie translation mistakes:  Using the first definition of a word that appears in the foreign-language/English dictionary.  They could also be the result of using really, really bad machine translation program, too.  I think a lot of signs in Asian countries, at least the ones that end up on engrish.com, are prepared by people with absolutely no knowledge of the structure of English and just a small English active vocabulary.  So, they just do a one-to-one substitution from their language into English, always choosing the first definition of the English word from their foreign-language/English dictionary. They just leave the word order as it appears in the original language, which seldom matches the English word order for the same expression.  Or they just latch onto the wrong word and run with it.  Since they don't really know any English and probably don't have anyone to do a sanity check, it sort of snowballs. 

It is possible to produce a smooth translation from an Asian language into a Western European language, but it is not for the faint of heart.  The syntax of Asian languages is very different from the syntax of Western European languages.  For example, Chinese doesn't really have what we would understand as a body of grammar.  It has sentence patterns and function words.  The sentence patterns, when rendered word-for-word with English words replacing their Chinese counterparts are often incomprehensible or just plain weird.  Function words are not really something an English speaker would understand, so when they are translated as-is or as their function in the middle of an English sentence, the English speaker just goes WTF?  Function words are basically characters that are placed before or after a word or phrase to indicate the function of that word or phrase in the sentence or its relation to the words before or after it.  The characters that are function words are also words themselves which when they are not being function words are just words with meanings entirely unrelated to their meaning as function words.  So it can be challenging to the uninitiated to determine what that character is actually doing there.  Is it a word?  Is it a function word?  The same conundrum happens when turning Chinese into English.  Function words get translated or their functional syntax rendered in the translation and hilarity ensues. 

The crap/carp transposition is very common in Asian-language-to-English signs.  Languages that are written in characters do not have spelling per se, so a transposition like that is not likely to be noticed or even understood unless the person doing it is a skilled translator, which the people who do the signs often appear not to be. 

Anyway, that's a quick and dirty and probably not very coherent explanation of how I think these things happen.  I've got an appointment and will check back later. 

Fascinating.

[wyouser]

Sometimes we screw it up in somebody elses language too. John F Kennedy's famous phrase from 1961 in Berlin when the Berlin Wall went up: "Ich bin ein Berliner." It was meant as I am a Berliner....but said this way means: " I am a donut".( "ein Berliner is a kind of local donut I am told)

[mmhmm]

Jan 22, 2015 15:31:35 GMT -5 wyouser said:

Sometimes we screw it up in somebody elses language too. John F Kennedy's famous phrase from 1961 in Berlin when the Berlin Wall went up: "Ich bin ein Berliner." It was meant as I am a Berliner....but said this way means: " I am a donut".( "ein Berliner is a kind of local donut I am told)

It's a jelly doughnut, to be precise. 

[wyouser]

It's trying to doa literal word for word translation from English to another language that can get you stared at. In 1971 I took part in a 6 week summer program in Germany. There were 22 of us working on "improving" our German . We were at the University of Freiburg for a few days. We found ourselves standing outside the door of the campus pub waiting in the fog and mist for it to open. A group of German students figured out we were americans and one asked me: "Wie gehts?" (How are you?) Being somewhat wet and freezing, I replied: "Ich bin kalt.". To which conversation about me stopped and I was suddenly the object of raised quizzical eyebrows and stares. You see I meant to say: I am cold" but translating that literally word for word into German what I said was "I am sexually frigid." The correct way to say: I (ich) am (bin) cold(kalt) is...Mir ist es kalt (to me it is cold)

[weltschmerz]

I just discovered it during a wayward image search.

I don't know what it is about foreigners failing at the English language that I find so funny, but I haven't laughed that hard in a long time.

Not as funny as English speakers failing at English.

[weltschmerz]

[Tennesseer]

Jan 22, 2015 15:31:35 GMT -5 wyouser said:

Sometimes we screw it up in somebody elses language too. John F Kennedy's famous phrase from 1961 in Berlin when the Berlin Wall went up: "Ich bin ein Berliner." It was meant as I am a Berliner....but said this way means: " I am a donut".( "ein Berliner is a kind of local donut I am told)

Not quite the 'Hole Truth' as Snopes says.

The Hole Truth

[Virgil Showlion]

Jan 22, 2015 17:47:39 GMT -5 weltschmerz said:

I just discovered it during a wayward image search.

I don't know what it is about foreigners failing at the English language that I find so funny, but I haven't laughed that hard in a long time.

Not as funny as English speakers failing at English.

It could be worse. It could be permanent.

[ՏՇԾԵԵʅՏɧ_LԹՏՏʅҼ]

And on that note,

[toomuchreality]

[mroped]

Carp- crap: I could see that going!

In Romanian, crap means...carp!

[weltschmerz]

I love smoked carp.

[NastyWoman]

Jan 22, 2015 20:00:38 GMT -5 weltschmerz said:

I love smoked carp.

 and if I could have some Kaffee und Kuchen(see window) from the Korean bakery potentially located in Malaysia  for dessert as well, I'd be a  really happy camper