Language Log

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:

A friend showed me a photograph of a Dutch chinoiserie tile panel from the late 17th-early 18th century, and asked me to help her identify some of the curious scenes represented on it. My eye, however, was immediately drawn to the cartouche in the upper left corner.

On first glance, the characters seem to be completely fake (made up). Even after straining my eyes and enlarging the panel, I couldn't recognize a single character.

Since I had gotten hooked on this inscription, I obtained a high resolution photograph showing only that part of the tile panel. Now the "characters" were clearer, and I thought to myself, "My, they look a bit like Jurchen script":

It's been a while since I've posted on Chinglish. In truth, I have an enormous backlog of precious items, some stretching back for years, but I just haven't been able to get to them because I've been trying to concentrate on more substantial topics lately. Today's example, however, is so amazing that I feel inspired to address it immediately.

Consider the photograph on the right, showing a notice on the door of a hotel room's shower stall.

What in the world is going on here? One big Chinese character and all those Roman letters beneath it:

拉

Latin
America

Tom Scocca, in Slate magazine, is full of scorn for the language of the New York Times. It is not always easy to discern his meaning (he uses a metaphor of lard in pie crusts, which I didn't quite follow), but he seems to think the Times is desperately concerned to "preserve its sacred function (or the appearance of its sacred function) of neutrally and modestly recording events, not judging them" — it struggles so hard to be neutral that it becomes vapid. He is incensed that the phrase "showed just how broadly" in the print edition was replaced in a later online edition by "raised new questions about how broadly", in this passage about the reported deaths of Gaddafi's son and grandsons in Tripoli:

And while the deaths could not be independently verified, the campaign against Libya’s most densely populated areas raised new questions about how broadly NATO is interpreting its United Nations mandate to protect civilians.

Scocca's bitterly scornful remark about the language involved is this:

There: in the disembodied implied passive, questions were raised. About the interpretation of the mandate. And just like that, we have bounced gently away from the bomb crater to a discussion about the understanding of a policy.

The disembodied implied passive? What is this, exactly?

From the menu of the Istanbul Kebab House near Times Square in New York City:

Putting aside the possibility that the author is a frustrated poet forced by parental pressure into the restaurant business, we can conclude that "vertical split" for "vertical spit" is an L2 malapropism, and that the reference to "ground" in place of "sliced" meat is a similar simple confusion about what "ground" means. But what about that "ingenious herd"?

I have in my hand a plastic bag that originally contained a CD and instruction manual for a Dell flat-panel display. As usual for such bags, it's printed with icons meant to discourage people from putting it over their head or using it as a baby pillow; and text that reads in English "WARNING: To avoid danger of suffocation, keep away from babies and children. Do not use in cribs, beds, carriages or playpens. This bag is not a toy."

The warning is repeated in French, German, Spanish, and Italian. The Italian one reads:

An Italian friend was taken aback by several aspects of this warning; and especially by the word "soffocazione". The trouble is, he told me, that this word doesn't exist. He doesn't mean that Italians have no way to express the concept of suffocation, just that they use a differently-derived word, namely "soffocamento".