Language Log

Meena Vathyam sent in this photograph from Shanghaiist:

The following article appeared in the April 7, 2013 issue of the Times of Israel:  "When Hitler and Schindler are the same character:  A Chinese translation of Irene Eber’s Holocaust memoir ‘The Choice’ exposes unique cross-cultural linguistic quandaries".  As soon as I saw the main title, I thought that something was a bit gefilteish.  After reading the subtitle, I knew for sure there was a problem.

Hiroshi Kumamoto (a specialist in Middle Iranian, especially Khotanese) sent in the following photograph of the sign on a water boiler in the Department of Linguistics at Tokyo University:

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: