Archive for Lost in translation
September 18, 2017 @ 8:43 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and religion, Lost in translation
A tweet by Alex Gabuev:
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September 14, 2017 @ 9:54 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and the movies, Lost in translation, Transcription
A friend of Rebecca Hamilton saw this at a local market in Dundee Scotland:
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September 13, 2017 @ 3:11 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Lost in translation
Tweet from Igor Denisov:
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September 13, 2017 @ 9:01 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and politics, Lost in translation, Proverbs, Puns
By itself, the phrase "xuéxí lù shàng 学习路上" means "on the path / way / road" of learning. However, when you see it in large characters at the top of a lavish website devoted to the life and works of President Xi Jinping, you cannot help but think that it also punningly conveys another meaning.
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September 12, 2017 @ 12:50 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Lost in translation, Signs
Zeyao Wu took these two pictures in Guangzhou. She found these signs in a small market which sells vegetables and fruits.
![Click to embiggen](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/manwc.jpg)
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September 6, 2017 @ 5:00 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and politics, Lost in translation, Multilingualism
Political poster in Sydney, Australia:
![Click to embiggen](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/sponke.jpg)
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September 3, 2017 @ 10:09 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Lost in translation, Multilingualism
Sign on a Sino-Tibetan restaurant:
![Click to embiggen](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/foof.jpg)
(Source)
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August 14, 2017 @ 10:19 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Lost in translation, Signs
Sign south of the demolished Pfeiffer Bridge on Highway 1 in Monterey County (photograph taken on August 12, 2017 by Richard Masoner while on a Big Sur bike trip, via Flickr):
![Bad machine translation](https://live.staticflickr.com/4345/36432472231_bb0c262546.jpg)
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August 3, 2017 @ 6:50 am· Filed by Geoffrey K. Pullum under Lost in translation
![](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/jacket.png)
This is a picture of the wording on an Italian-made baby jacket, a gift to the granddaughter of a friend of a friend after the child was baptised recently in Florence, Italy. Your guess at the intended meaning is as good as mine.
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July 17, 2017 @ 12:20 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Lost in translation, Signs
Two gems from Chris Brannick via Facebook (the first is from the site of the Immortality Pills in Guangzhou and the second is from the Langham Place Hotel, also in Guangzhou):
![](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/prohibited.png)
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July 17, 2017 @ 12:12 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Lost in translation
Below are two pages from the instruction book for a small point and shoot digital camera (the original in Chinese and the corresponding page translated into English). As you can see, the language display has a couple of strange choices.
![Click to embiggen](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/jane1.jpg)
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July 13, 2017 @ 8:29 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and religion, Lost in translation
Yesterday's NYT has an article by Javier C. Hernández titled "China’s Religious Revival Fuels Environmental Activism" (7/12/17). It's a long article, filled with a lot of New Age, ecological phraseology that is uncharacteristic of the usual political, military, and economic discourse of the antireligious PRC. I was drifting along, not paying too much attention to the details of what it said, but this short paragraph — quoting a Taoist monk named Xuan Jing — caught me up short:
As he sipped tea, he jotted down Taoist teachings: “Humans follow the earth, the earth follows heaven, heaven follows Taoism, Taoism follows nature.”
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July 12, 2017 @ 10:26 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and advertising, Language and food, Lost in translation
No, these are not plums consisting of preserved wives, nor are they plums made by preserved wives, nor are they anything else you are likely to think of based on the English name.
Why am I even talking about this? How did this bizarre subject come up?
In a comment to "Vegetable students" (7/11/17), David Morris asked about the name of a Chinese snack called "Preserved Wife Plum" that a colleague offered to him. He said that "three Chinese speaking ESL or translating teachers couldn't explain" the name. I made some preliminary attempts to describe what this snack was like, but David and John Swindle repeated the request for an explanation of the name.
I was snared.
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