Archive for Lost in translation
Pork Lion Bone
Seen by François Lang at the meat counter at The Great Wall in Rockville, MD:
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Elevator etiquette and rules (lots of 'em)
On the inside (N.B.) doors of a lift in Wuhan (yes that [in]famous Wuhan):
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"Don't blindly save yourself"
The following photo is from Guanghzhou and was taken recently by David Lobina's partner who’s there now.
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Oil separator / cooker
When I entered the Airbnb where I'm now staying, one of the first things that caught my attention was the following utensil:
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Toilet use information mega translation fail
From John Rohsenow, via Mabel Menard, comes this bit of Japanglish:
(source)
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"Double pan"
Whatever that means.
That's what we get when we enter into AI translation software (GT, Baidu, Bing, DeepL) this key term — "双泛" — from this important policy document concerning the governance of Xinjiang issued by the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Committee of the CCP.
Shuāng 双 is simple: it means "double". Fair enough. But 泛 in this disyllabic expression is notoriously difficult to deal with. It can be pronounced either fàn, in which case it means "to float on water; to drift; to spread out; to be suffused with; to flood; to overflow; superficial; non-specific; extensive; general; pan-; careless; reckless", fěng, in which case it means "to turn over; to topple over; to be destroyed; to be defeated; to fall", or fá, in which case it signifies the sound of water.
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A medieval Dunhuang man
Bilingual label for a wall painting at the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, Gansu, China:
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Used to be a bun
Somking
Sign at Dunhuang, at the western end of the Gansu Corridor in northwestern China, where I did my doctoral research more than half a century ago (there were no signs like this in those days):
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