Language Log

The following mistranslations have been drawn from this collection:

"50 Times Signs Were So Hilariously Translated, People Just Had To Share Them Online", Liucija Adomaite and Justinas Keturka, Bored Panda (about a week ago)

Of the fifty items collected here, I've already dealt with more than half of them in other posts, and another portion are too lame to worry about.

Here goes:

Forgot to turn on the Spanish translator.

From the Facebook account of Mei Han:

Enigmatic East Asian sign:

Glat perch

Label in a Chinese fish market:

Ambarish Sridharanarayanan sent in this image of a restaurant menu from Chennai:

Looks like this one might have to be outlawed:

(source)

At the top left and bottom left of this restaurant's home page, written in very small Roman capital letters, it says, "ORISSIC HOT POT", and that is paired with the Chinese name, "zhè yī xiǎoguō 這一小鍋" ("this small pot").

If we do a Google search on "orissic hot pot 這一小鍋" (without the quote marks), we will get 4 pages and 80,000 ghits, the first of which is bafflingly "jīngdiǎn shítou guō" 經典石頭鍋 ("Classic Stone [hot] pot").  If we do a Google search on "經典石頭鍋 classic stone [hot] pot" (without the quote marks), we will get 4 pages and 15,100 ghits.

Some random specimens…

This is one of the thorniest, orneriest Chinglish puzzles I've ever been confronted with.

Confused by this category of toilet brush. Can @LanguageLog illuminate what’s happened here? pic.twitter.com/lHaqM3OD3q

— Henry Hitchings (@henryhitchings) October 26, 2022

Hit the Engrish mother lode.  What an incredibly bountiful harvest!

We've ignored this (ig)noble variety of English for too long.  There are scores and scores (nay, hundreds) of wonderful examples on the Facebook group Engrish in Japan, which you may explore to your heart's content.  Since some of the posts cycle through multiple items (e.g., in the comments sections), they seem almost endless (I read them for hours).  For this post, I will focus primarily on a recent item, which is about onsen 温泉 ("hot springs" [and bathing facilities]) etiquette, but will also mention many others.

(source)

From Yuanfei Wang in Hong Kong:

From Francis Miller: