Language Log

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.)

There are four authentic Apple stores in China, two in Beijing and two in Shanghai, with plans to open another in Shanghai and one in Hong Kong by the end of the year. I've been in one of the Beijing stores and in one of the Shanghai stores; they are palaces of iPods, iPads, iPhones, and all manner of other Apple products.

A blogger in Kunming, Yunnan Province of China, has stumbled upon devilishly realistic Apple Store knockoffs — the whole kit and kaboodle, including circular stairs and laid-back staff in blue t-shirts who appear to believe that they are working for Apple Computer, Inc., not some Chinese shānzhài 山寨 ("imitation; pirated brand") outfit. Her account of these stores in Kunming (BirdAbroad (July 20, 2011, with later updates, including a video) "Are you listening, Steve Jobs?") has gone absolutely viral, with more than a million visitors to her site, and the story being picked up by thousands of news outlets.

Baidu ("the Chinese Google") is a popular search engine in China.  The web services company (registered in the Cayman Islands) and its name are discussed in "Soon to be lost in translation," which I posted a little over a year ago.

Now Baidu has launched a new machine translation service.  A friend of mine in China impishly suggested that I give Baidu Fanyi a whirl by typing in 我恨中国.  Language Log readers are invited to try it themselves and see what they get.