Language Log

The following sign appears on a vending machine that provides free condoms at a maternity hospital in Beijing:

Kira Simon-Kennedy took this photograph at a 7-Eleven in Beijing:

(Click to embiggen.)

Carley De Rosa spotted this sign in the Kunming airport on her way to Laos. Dumbfounded by the Chinglish, not least because what it called an "elevator" was actually an "escalator", on her way back from Laos she made sure to get a photograph of the sign and send it to me for analysis:

Near my hotel on the Plaça Imperial Tarraco in Tarragona, the indicators to tell pedestrians when they can cross the street have a countdown in seconds to the next green: a minute ticks by, the lights go yellow for the vehicular traffic at 6 seconds, then red at 3 seconds, and finally — 3, 2, 1, liftoff — the little green man is displayed and you can walk across. Only in Tarragona the little green man figure does not just pose in a walking sort of shape: he moves. Those little green arms and legs are working away: he seems to be race-walking. And that's not all: when there's only 7 seconds left, he begins to sprint.

Six of us were dining in Tarragona on Tuesday night, and the topic of bottled water came up. We all agreed, it is a scandal that diesel fuel is being used to move bottled water around the earth's surface when often it has no chemical advantage whatever over tapwater. What an ecological disaster. What a ripoff. We all insisted we wanted tapwater, and our Spanish-speaking Catalunya-resident host clearly understood us. But three bottles of spa water duly arrived.

Every year around this time, I write about the relevant Chinese zodiacal animal.  Here are some recent posts:

• 2011: rabbit
• 2010: tiger
• 2009: ox

2012 is the year of the dragon, which in Modern Standard Mandarin is lóng (simplified 龙 traditional / complicated 龍).

In the Hotel Ciutat de Tarragona, the beautiful modern hotel in Tarragona where I am currently staying, I ate breakfast in the 1st-floor restaurant (Americans: that would be the 2nd floor), and then came out to take the elevator back up to my 5th-floor room (Americans: 6 floors up). But I was baffled: there was no button to call the elevator for upward journeys. There was just a button labeled with the Down-Arrow symbol for calling the elevator to go back down to the lobby on level 0. Some sort of security, I assumed, to ensure that random restaurant patrons don't go up in the elevator to wander up and down the halls looking for unlocked doors or stealable items. But then how was I to get back up to my room? I'm ashamed to report just how long it took me to resolve the conundrum here. Perhaps you would like to solve it for yourself before you read on.

At the Barcelona airport, near the parking structure where I was waiting for a Plana bus to Tarragona yesterday (two hours on the flight; two hours waiting for a bus: sigh), is a large and prominent box of what is obviously important equipment of some kind; and it is clearly labeled as being exclusively for the use of bombers.

Someone recently told Tom Bishop (creator of Wenlin software for learning Chinese) that Google Translate is really good now, so he tried translating this English paragraph into Chinese (chosen randomly from the cave adventure game):

You are on one side of a large, deep chasm.  A heavy white mist rising up from below obscures all view of the far side.  A southwest path leads away from the chasm into a winding corridor.

The result is:

Nín shì yīgè dà de, shēn de hónggōu de yībiān. Yīgè chénzhòng de bái wù, cóng xiàmiàn shàngshēng yǎngàile suǒyǒu de yuǎnfāng de kànfǎ. Xīnán lùjìng xìnxī hónggōu, chéngwéi yīgè huíláng. 您是一个大的，深的鸿沟的一边。一个沉重的白雾，从下面上升掩盖了所有的远方的看法。西南路径信息鸿沟，成为一个回廊。

[This is a guest post by Bob Ladd.]

Following the wreck of the Costa Concordia last weekend (one Italian comic suggested it should be renamed Costa Codardia, where codardia means "cowardice"), I've been temporarily taken on as a correspondent by Language Log's Italian desk in order to report on a few linguistic aspects of the already notorious telephone call between the Coast Guard captain De Falco and the ship's much criticized captain Schettino.

We'd better get used to it; pinyin romanizations will be showing up in English with increasing regularity. For example, someone who catches a glimpse of this sign may think that it has something to do with writing instruments:

Minru Li sent me this photograph which appears at the top of the China English blog:

Upon first glance, I was mystified because of the large space between the first three Chinese characters and three English words in red, and the last two Chinese characters and two English words in green. Within two seconds, however, I figured out what had happened to bring about such a hilarious translation, but was still curious what the missing top half of the first character was.

Michael Kaan poses a tough question about how to make cōngyóubǐng 葱油饼 ("green onion pancakes"; lit., "scallion oil pancakes"):

I was watching a recipe on YouTube for one of my favorite Chinese snacks, con you bing, and I used Google's translate function to get the recipe in English (I watched it in Chrome and right-clicked to get it). As you can see in the attachment with screen shots [VHM: copied below], the fifth step in the recipe is quite technically elaborate: you have to use the Jaws of Death to twist the dough.

[VHM: because I'm in China, I can't see this or any other YouTube video — YouTube is completely blocked by the PRC authorities.]

My cooking skills are limited and I really don't want to purchase Jaws of Death just for one recipe. Is there something in the original Taiwanese Mandarin that I'm missing?