Language Log

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.

Thanks to Graeme Forbes for alerting me to this! He has given me permission to post his note to his pro-compositionality friends. [For readers for whom compositionality is a new concept: it's a central tenet of formal semantics, usually credited to Gottlob Frege (but not without some controversy): The meaning of the whole is a function of the meaning of the parts and of the way they are syntactically combined. See, for instance: this introductory handout or the entry on Compositionality in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.]

From Graeme Forbes:

You may have already seen this, but in case not, here's an excerpt from an article in the current New Yorker, "Easy, Tiger", by David Sedaris (July 11/18 2011, p.40). It's an entertaining piece about how he "mastered" Mandarin, Japanese and German with the aid of tourist-courses on his iPod, including one from a company called Pimsleur. The "Easy, Tiger" alludes to a phrase in the section on romance in the Mandarin course. Or was it the German course? Surely not!

Mai Kuha's new gardening gloves contain a large nylon ship, at least in Spanish:

Here is a mystifying sign directing passengers in a new Chiayi (Jiayi, in southwestern Taiwan) building that links a bus terminal with a railroad terminal:

Looking at Geoff's post on machine-translated phishing scam messages, the message certainly does come across as very similar to the English output we in the biz frequently see coming out of statistical machine translation of Chinese. This includes Chinese-specific issues like recovering correct determiners from a language that does not express them overtly (I hope that the [not this] letter meets you in good spirits), as well as the ubiquitous phenomenon of sentences that are locally coherent — thanks to phrase-level translations and good statistical language-models for English — but globally nonsensical. I don't claim to know what makes a text poetic, but it seems to me that this combination of local coherence and larger-scale disconnectedness must be at least partly responsible for what Geoff describes as the "strange poetry" of machine translationese.

You know what I think is happening? This is just too insane not to be true. I believe Hong Kong script kiddies wanting to try Nigerian-style thieving of bank account details are actually using Google Translate to translate their phishing messages from Chinese into English. Below the fold I quote in full (obscuring my address with x's to outwit the spam robots) a wildly, asyntactically unintelligible phishing spam which I received today. It's unintendedly hilarious — you could try reading it aloud at parties. And it's so garbled and implausible that I can't believe even poor naive Aunt Mildred will be suckered. Interestingly, it shows clear signs of being the output of very bad corpus-based translation, unsupervised and unchecked. My suspicion of Chinese provenance was based not just on the .hk (Hong Kong) address, but also on the fact that the spammer thinks an English-speaking PhD named Dr. Roller Key would refer to himself as Dr. Roller — that is, the Chinese syntax for personal names is being assumed.

I'm in France for a few days, at a workshop at ENSTA on Traitement de l'information multimédia. I'm staying with friends who have an energetic and enterprising two-year-old son, and so I've had the opportunity to do a bit of language acquisition. One of the commoner bits of child-directed speech, at least in this particular household, is a familiar French exclamation that I'll write as "X là là!", where "X" stands for a range of vowel qualities from IPA [ɑ] through [o] to [u].

All the versions of this exclamation share the factor of surprise, or at least the idea that something is out of the ordinary and worthy of note. But there's another dimension: is the noteworthy thing good or bad? And as far as I can tell, the higher and rounder the initial vowel, the more problematic the event or object under discussion.

Apparently the international branch of the Bèn School of Translation has landed a contract with a certain cruise line to translate their menus. Here is the first of six buffet items, which begins innocently enough in English as "Chicken and Mushroom Tart":

Chengde (formerly Jehol), which lies 109 miles / 176 kilometers to the northeast of Beijing, was the old Manchu summer retreat, and is now a popular tourist destination. One its most notable attractions is the Putuo Zongcheng Temple, built by the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735-1796) as a copy of the Potala Palace in Lhasa. Here is a photograph of the Chinese part of the sign describing a gate within the temple compound:

Regular readers of Language Log will have guessed that the punch line is in the English translation: