Language Log

It can cover partially-used containers of cat food:

Spotted by Oliver Renwick's wife, while waiting for a train in Fes, Morocco:

Oliver's comment:

I don’t think I’ve heard the word ‘wight’ outside of Tolkien, and I don’t understand, even with a machine, how you could get ‘wight’ from ‘blanc’. The only conclusion I can come to is that we actually had a human translator who didn’t know how to spell ‘white’ and yet thought they were qualified to continue with a translation that now appears on who knows how many tens of thousands of sugar packets.

Reader GL was amused by this label on a package of garden stakes:

(Click on the image for a more complete picture of the package.)

In several recent posts ("Difficult to find the translation," "Google me with a fire spoon"), we've seen evidence that Google Translate has become the preferred automatic translation tool from Chinese to English, sometimes with rather peculiar results.

Now reader Mike Wasson has discovered a quirky translation going the other direction (from English to Chinese).

Usually an unintelligible or partially intelligible Chinglish sign is due to faulty translation, whether human or machine. But not always. Recently, when I was rushing from my room at the Kucha Guest House in Xinjiang (the Uyghur Autonomous Region in the far west of China) through a huge greenhouse to the dining room for breakfast, I was stopped in my tracks by the following sign:

A few days ago, MikeTheDudeHenry posted a picture of his first tattoo on Reddit's /r/tattoos discussion board, with the explanation "Cemel Dosce = latin for 'Know Thyself'":

According to http://www.dailyginger.com/uk-minister-to-discuss-twitter-facebook-bans/99263828?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter", on "your one stop online daily news portal" the Daily Ginger, which I will not link to for reasons that will become clear below, yesterday this happened:

Prime Minister David Cameron referred to boundary upon amicable networking in a arise of a unrest

Top military officers as well as alternative supervision officials will additionally be benefaction for a meeting, which follows riots which swept England progressing this month

Twitter, Facebook, as well as BlackBerry builder Research in Motion all declined to contend what on all sides they would take during a meeting

British Home Secretary Theresa May will lay down with officials from a amicable media attention Thursday, her bureau said, as a supervision considers perplexing to anathema people from amicable networking during or after crises

I'm actually going to miss print media when they go away.

The following photograph was found on the internet by Charles Mok and was shared by Rebecca MacKinnon (of the Berkman Center) on Facebook:

Just make sure that you don't slip on the pasta! Seriously, though, what is a traveler supposed to do when instructed to "wait outside rice-flour noodle"?

I got a royalty check from Chicago today, and I stared in astonishment at the home address on the payment advice. It was roughly correct in the first four lines, but the last line, after "EDINBURGH EH3 6RY", where the country name "United Kingdom" should have come, said "TAIWAN, PROVINCE OF CHINA".

From Down Under, Valerie Syverson sent in the following photograph taken at a storefront in Sydney's Chinatown:

As she notes, the sign is advertising what appear to be leek turnovers as "Bradysia homozygous". Bradysia is the scientific name of a genus of fungus gnats; a homozygous individual has identical alleles of a given gene on both homologous chromosomes.  How did we get from leek turnovers to the genetics of insects?

The following sign is posted in the Sanqing Shan district of Shangrao prefectural city (northeast Jiangxi province in southeast central China):

Since a monlingual English speaker in distress who reads this sign will only end up deeper in despair, we need to unpack the Chinese and English to see what went wrong.

Now playing at Pier 17 in New York, "Bodies… The Exhibition".

Visitors literate in Chinese were welcomed to the exhibit in a particularly ghoulish way:

Despite its simple and straightforward Chinese vocabulary, this sign in Dalian (a large city in northeast China) is badly translated into English:

(As usual, you may click on the photograph to embiggen it.)