Language Log

Daniel Tse spotted this sign in Seoul recently:

Nathan Vedal wrote to tell me about an interesting mistranslation into Chinese that he recently came across.

Having purchased some not particularly healthy, but quite delicious, instant noodles produced by a Korean company, he was perusing the Chinese instructions, which included the following sentence:

From theChive:

The latest collection of "lost in translation" signs from the Mail Online offers some doozies:

This photograph was taken at the northern train station in Changchun, China:

The following sign was posted on Weibo (China's Twitter clone):

Yunong Zhou sent me the following signs from China:

Sign in the window of a snack shop in Houhai district of Beijing called Beijing Snacks (Bǎinián lǔ zhě 百年卤者 [Century Braiser]):

Today's "Get Fuzzy":

The following feature from the Nandu website includes many strange and droll language games:

James Errington sends this along via Twitter:

On BoingBoing, Jason Weisberger posted this photograph under the title "Found Poem", but without any explanation:

The rumors are flying that Apple will introduce a new device called the "iPhone Math" in June of this year.  Since that is a highly improbable name for an iPhone (is this going to be some kind of fancy calculator?), skeptical minds have been trying to find the source of the rumors.  The earliest known occurrences of the expression "iPhone Math" are to be found in Taiwanese media, so one suspects that there was some sort of distortion of a hypothetical "iPhone Plus / iPhone +" (semantic garbling) or a hypothetical iPhone Max (phonetic garbling).  After jumbled translation or transcription from English to Chinese, then back again into English, either of those names might conceivably have come out as "iPhone Math", which would indeed be a weird name for an iPhone.