Language Log

From Graeme Orr:

I found this children’s toy at a local newsagency.  The manufacturer has the class to ape Lego and Minions, but not to hire an English translator.

I wonder what went awry.  ‘Deformed’ might connote blocks that can take any form?

Headline in Global Times today (9/10/20):

Since the colorful, eye-catching term "vicious smears" has been popping up elsewhere in PRC English language media these days, colleagues have been wondering where it comes from in PRC Chinese language media.  Tracking down the Chinese original of this Global times article, it seems that "full of errors, inconsistent with the facts, and full of vicious smears against China" in this article is translated from "cuòlòu bǎichū, yǔ shìshí yánzhòng bùfú, chōngchìzhe duì Zhōngfāng de èdú gōngjí mǒhēi 错漏百出，与事实严重不符，充斥着对中方的恶毒攻击抹黑", and thus the Chinese word they use for "smears" in this article is "gōngjí 攻击 ("attack") mǒhēi 抹黑 ("discredit / [bring] shame [on] / defame / blacken OR tarnish [someone's reputation]")"; and "èdú gōngjí mǒhēi 恶毒攻击抹黑" for "vicious smears". Without the reference to the original Chinese sentence, I would probably translate "vicious smears" as "èdú de huǐbàng 恶毒的毁谤" ("vicious slander") given this specific context.

From the Twitter feed of @ShabanaMir1:

Ikea what is you doing 💀💀💀 pic.twitter.com/WOX35ZaG7n

— fats (@omarfats) August 18, 2020

The Zeesea cosmetics company, based in China, is advertising three new sets of products "X the British Museum", in a relationship that they call a "partnership" and a "cobranding  product line": "Mysterious Egypt", "Alice in Wonderland", and "Angel Cupid".

I'm guessing that the British Museum's role in the partnership did not extend to input on the English names of the products. For example, the Alice in Wonderland Mascara collection includes ten colors, one of which is "Rust Red", advertised with the tag line "After coloring the United States to suffocation can be sweet super A strawberry jam":

[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce]

Your wonderful arabesque on the world of 'kedi'* (and the disappearance of cats for a time — perhaps to a different planet, because they had grown weary of trying to school us humans?) reminded me that you are a connoisseur of languages plural, not just Chinese. In that connection, you might find my 2019 article** on Mendeleev interesting.

From an anonymous correspondent:

An amusing translation glitch: Google translates the Japanese word "migaku 磨く" (to polish, to brush) to the French word "polonais" (Polish, as in "of Poland").

The full translation party: "migaku 磨く" → "polonais" → "kenma 研磨" (polishing, grinding) → "polissage" (proper French for polishing).

Tonight we're rewatching The Good, The Bad and The Ugly in honor of Ennio Morricone, the composer of its iconic score, who died today. Deediedeedledee nwah nwah nwaaaaahhh

And I've just had a thought about the title that turns on the quite different interpretations of the-Adj constructions in English and Italian, which I mainly know about from this paper by Hagit Borer and Isabelle Roy .

In English, "the Adj" generally only allows a generic reading, and often refers to the class of humans characterized by the adjective, as in the poor, the rich, etc. In Italian (and French, Spanish, etc.) this isn't the case; the construction, although based on the same syntax, can also receive a particular referential singular interpretation. Borer and Roy ascribe this to the presence of identifying number and gender features on the determiner in those languages.

In the original Italian title of the movie, Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo ('The good.masc.sg, The ugly.masc.sg, the bad.masc.sg.) these 'The-Adj' sequences are referential; they refer to the three main characters Blondie, Angel Eyes and Tuco. The Italian title is more or less equivalent to English "The good guy, the bad guy and the ugly guy". 

In English, though, the grammatical structure of the title can only get the generic reading. The use of these forms in the film to refer to three protagonists, then, bestows an archetypal quality on those characters; they're metonymically interpreted as instantiating the whole classes of good people, bad people and ugly people respectively. And the kind of mythic force it imparts somehow fits so perfectly with the grandiose yet tongue-in-cheek quality of the whole film, to me it's really a fundamental part of its impact, humor and appeal.

My question is, do you think Leone and the scriptwriters understood this property of the English translation? Or did they read their English calque of the Italian grammatical structure just as they would have read the Italian? The Italian title, in fact, with its masculine singular marking, cannot be understood in the same way as the English is. To represent the English interpretation in Italian, apparently, the plural would be needed: i belli, i brutti, i cattivi. My guess is that neither the writers nor the director realized that the title read so differently in English. 

 According to Wikipedia, the Italian title was a last-minute suggestion of screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni, and the title for the English version was determined by the studio after some alternatives were bandied about and rejected. I wonder if someone at United Artists recognized the different reading, and the epic quality it imparted, when they were discussing the choice!

Thanks to Roberta d'Alessandro and other Facebook linguists for Italian judgments and discussion!

From Victor Steinbok:

So my mother's friend's husband is stuck in a hotel in Saudi Arabia and this is the order menu they gave him

Do I have any Arabic speaking followers that can help make sense of this but also, tag yourself, I'm "Normal doubt" pic.twitter.com/MVemyCCON9

— Vlada ✨😈✨ (@vladadraws) May 24, 2020

A large-enough-to-read image is here.

News sources around the world reported recently on a tragedy — "Officials: Chinese Ambassador to Israel Found Dead in Home", Associated Press 5/17/2020:

JERUSALEM — The Chinese ambassador to Israel was found dead in his home north of Tel Aviv on Sunday, Israel’s Foreign Ministry said.

Israeli Police Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the ambassador's death was believed to be from natural causes.

Du Wei, 58, was appointed envoy in February in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. He previously served as China’s envoy to Ukraine. He was found dead at the ambassador's official residence in Herzliya.

But if you read it on Israel Hayom (or other Hebrew sources) via Google Translate, you'll get a different picture:

Two years on, and still my favourite Chinese mistranslation…. pic.twitter.com/0EHeQjybeB

— Antiokhos among the Angles (@AntiokhosE) May 6, 2020

From Paul Shore:

I don't know whether the item below, an Amazon translation of an Amazon customer review, is Language-Log-worthy; but I thought that at the very least you might be amused by its sublime anti-logic.  The January 1, 2017 review, written by "横川いずみ", is of Freedom Betrayed, Herbert Hoover's massive, radical critique of U.S. foreign relations from the thirties to the fifties, which wasn't published until 2011, roughly a half-century after Hoover completed it.  In the heading, 横川いずみ rates the book five stars out of five and "[v]ery good".  The Japanese original of the review text is as follows:

[This is a guest post by Cyrus Shaoul]

I am a long time LL reader and I came across an interesting machine translation error today.

When my Japanese friend sent me this sentence:

62年前のこの日に慶應義塾大学病院で命を授かりました。

I was flummoxed by the verb 授かる [VHM:  sazukaru {"be gifted / endowed with (an award / title); to be blessed (e.g., with a child); be granted / taught; to be given something of great value / a treasure, by deities or someone of higher social class"}] at the end of the sentence, so I asked Google Translate for help and lo and behold, it said:

"On this day, 62 years ago, I died at Keio University Hospital."