Language Log

Here is a closeup of a remarkable work of installation art that is being shown at this year's Venice Biennale:

The following restaurant sign in Uyghur and Chinese was sent in by Fangyi Cheng:

With three different kinds of paper, no less. Last week I spent a couple of days at a hotel in the Hague. In the elevator, there were advertisements for the hotel's restaurant, featuring among other things a dish described in English as

SHELLFISH SOUP WITH THREE TYPES OF PAPER WITH THE INGREDIENTS OF RUST

The Dutch version confirmed my guess that the "rust" was rouille:

EEN BISQUE VAN SCHAALDIEREN MET DRIE SOORTEN PAPIER VAN DE INGREDIËNTEN VAN ROUILLE

Rouille does mean "rust" in French, but in this context it would be translated into English as into Dutch as "rouille" — as Wikipedia explains, it's

… a sauce that consists of olive oil with breadcrumbs, garlic, saffron and chili peppers. It is served as a garnish with fish, fish soup and, notably, bouillabaisse.

On the Wall Street Journal's Emerging Europe blog, Emre Peker reports on a case of linguistic chicanery, with none other than Noam Chomsky as its victim.

Coming from Noam Chomsky, the following sentences may look as if the famed American linguist was seeking to develop a new syntax: “While there have been tampered with, sometimes with the Republic of Turkey won democracy. It ruled democratic elections.”

Except they didn’t belong to Mr. Chomsky, but to an imaginative Turkish newspaper, while the quotes appear to have been translated into English using Google’s translation tool.

On August 27, Turkish daily Yeni Safak, or New Dawn, published a front page article headlined–“The Arab Spring Has Now Found Its True Spirit”–which it claimed was based on an e-mailed exchange with Mr. Chomsky. The interview, which was conducted in English and centered on the crisis in Egypt, had taken place two weeks previously, the story said.

According to Yeni Safak, the renowned antiwar activist spent a considerable part of the exchange defending policies parallel to those of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The newspaper also cited several answers by the world’s most famous linguistics professor in unintelligible English.

“This complexity in the Middle East, do you think the Western states flapping because of this chaos? Contrary to what happens when everything that milk port, enters the work order, then begins to bustle in the West. I’ve seen the plans works,” Mr. Chomsky allegedly said in an answer to one question.

The text, however, flows perfectly in Turkish. Plugging the Turkish content into Google Translate shows that Mr. Chomsky was left uttering phrases like “milk port”–a direct translation of an idiom derived from sailing that means “calm.”

"Frazz", Sept. 4, 2013:

From "Zits" for August 30, 2013 — the episode just before the one featured in "Earworms and white bears":

Quincy Lu sent in the following photograph of a menu taken by his wife at a Hunan restaurant in Fremont, California (click to embiggen):

For the last week, the whole Chinese world was transfixed by the trial of Bo Xilai, the fallen star of the Chinese Communist Party.  Among the lurid details of crime and corruption that emerged, perhaps none has elicited greater excitement than Bo's revelation that his wife, Gu Kailai (already convicted of the murder of a British businessman named Neil Heywood), and his "top cop", Wang Lijun (already convicted of treachery and treason), carried out an illicit love affair.

The expressions Bo used to describe the romance between his wife and his chief of police have challenged the translation skills of China's journalists.

We've often written about horrendous Chinese tattoo blunders on Language Log (with a general survey here), there is a whole website dedicated to them, and now BuzzFeed offers a generous assortment of "34 Ridiculous Chinese Character Tattoos Translated". All of the photographs are great, and many of the translations are serviceable, some even inspired, but several of them are wrong or could be improved. I won't go through all 34, and indeed, I've already covered at least one of them on Language Log, but will concentrate on a few that are particularly interesting.

The Chinese electronic commerce company called AliExpress offers for sale this unusual product:

Magic grass of queerness diy desktop mini plant bonsai mosquito radiation-resistant qu wencao

Because I know Chinese and am used to reading Chinglish, I could figure out this product name on the first go, but to provide an adequate exegesis for Language Log readers, I shall endeavor to recreate the Chinese upon which it is based, then retranslate it into more immediately intelligible and idiomatic English.

Francis Miller sent in this photograph of a lollapalooza of a Chinglish banner (click to embiggen):

For the last couple of weeks we've been focusing on loans from Chinese and Japanese into English and from English into Chinese and Japanese. In this post, I'd like to demonstrate the intricate intertwining of Mandarin, topolectal Chinese, Japanese, and English, with Japanese providing for Chinese two key terms from comic book culture. All of these things are illustrated in the following promotional item that Nuno Sobral stumbled upon in the QQ music app:

Cheng Fangyi sent in the following photograph of a sign in China: