Language Log

The New York Times reports on efforts by Shanghai officials to crack down on Chinglish, but the prospects are daunting:

For English speakers with subpar Chinese skills, daily life in China offers a confounding array of choices. At banks, there are machines for “cash withdrawing” and “cash recycling.” The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “fried enema,” “monolithic tree mushroom stem squid” and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “The Jew’s Ear Juice.”
Those who have had a bit too much monolithic tree mushroom stem squid could find themselves requiring roomier attire: extra-large sizes sometimes come in “fatso” or “lard bucket” categories. These and other fashions can be had at the clothing chain known as Scat.

As a Sinologist, one thing that really annoys me is when someone sanctimoniously invokes phony Orientalism to embellish their speech or writing.  One egregious example is that the Chinese "character / symbol" for "crisis" is made up of "danger" plus "opportunity."

Several days ago, Frank Chance sent me the following note:

Lao Zi Quote:

Hmmm…this doesn't seem to correspond with any part of the Laozi I know…not that it matters.

Labelling it "Lao Zi Apocrypha," I sent the card around to some friends and colleagues.

Six of us — three philosophers, two linguists, and a mathematician — were having dinner the Café Noir in Providence last Thursday night, and when three of us decided on the excellent boeuf bourguignon, someone at the table told a story of a colleague who tried to include the phrase boeuf bourguignon in a word-processed file and found that the spell-checker recommended correcting the spelling to Beowulf Burlington.

Drew Mackie has posted an item about this not very appetizing-sounding Chinese dish on his personal blog.  He writes:  "A bit of searching has led me only to find out that this food is not, in fact, enema content that is fried, but I don't know exactly what it is or how it might have gotten its name."

The crash-blossom-y headline that Geoff Pullum just posted about, "Google's Computer Might Betters Translation Tool," has been changed in the online edition of The New York Times to something more sensible: "Google’s Computing Power Refines Translation Tool." The headline in the print edition, says LexisNexis, is "Google Can Now Say No to 'Raw Fish Shoes,' in 52 Languages." This is a typical example of the gap between oblique print headlines and their more straightforward online equivalents designed with search engines in mind. (See the April 2006 Times article, "This Boring Headline Is Written for Google.")

At the very hour when, a few days ago, Victor Mair was posting his piece about Valentine's Day in Japan (I Tiger You), I was at ground zero for the event: the candy section of the biggest department store in Tokyo's Ginza district. I have never seen anything like it. Excited young women by the thousand buying up all the chocolate and other candy that industry could pack into pink and white heart-bedecked boxes and bags. What an incredible coup the candy manufacturers have made out of this celebration of girlfriendhood and boyfriendhood. The ratio of refined sugar and teenage girls to oxygen had reached danger level in the confined space of the department store basement, and I fled from this stampede of candy lust, escaping into the cold afternoon air. I'll tell you a secret: I simply cannot bear Tokyo.

Last month I posted a link to a Schott's Vocab Q&A with Claude Hagège on endangered languages. Some commenters immediately picked up on one of Hagège's statements about translation:

However, there exists an important activity which clearly shows that even though the ways languages grasp the world may vary widely from one language to another, they all build, in fact, the same contents, and equivalent conceptions of the world. This activity is translation. Any text in any language can be translated into a text in another language. These two texts express the same meaning. We can therefore conclude that despite the differences between the ways languages grasp the world, all languages are easily convertible into one another, because humans interpret the world along the same, or comparable, semantic lines.

Barbara Partee contributed this comment:

Emmon Bach has put it nicely: The best argument in favor of the universality of natural language expressive power is the possibility of translation. The best argument against universality is the impossibility of translation (i.e. that we often can't really translate exactly). [link added–EB]

Translation ain't easy, even for skilled humans — and (especially) for machines. Google Translate appears to be among the better tools out there, but as the comments section of what (I believe) was Language Log's first reference to Google's translation tool shows, you can have quite a bit of fun breaking it. Moreover, breaking it is easy and can happen completely inadvertently, a lesson that (from what I hear, anyway) is quite often learned too late by desperate students trying to take shortcuts while doing their homeworks for beginning language classes.

Top story of the morning in the UK for the serious language scientist must surely be the report in The Sun concerning a children's toy mouse that is supposed to sing "Jingle bells, jingle bells" but instead sings "Pedophile, pedophile". Said one appalled mother who squeezed the mouse, "Luckily my children are too young to understand." The distributors, a company called Humatt, of Ferndown in Dorset, claims that the man in China who recorded the voice for the toy "could not pronounce certain sounds." And the singing that he recorded "was then speeded up to make it higher-pitched — distorting the result further." (A good MP3 of the result can be found here.) They have recalled the toy.

Shocked listeners to BBC Radio 4 this morning heard the presenters read this story out while collapsing with laughter. Language Log is not amused. If there was ever a more serious confluence of issues in speech technology, the Chinese language, freedom of speech, taboo language, and the protection of children, I don't know when.

In this morning's Stone Soup, another take on that highly efficient language, Dude:

Dan Scherlis has pointed me to the recent #thingsdarkiessay TwitterStorm. Khaya Dlanga described it at length in a weblog post a week ago ("Yesterday, a short-lived war broke out between the US and SA"):

A virtual war between the United States and South Africa was full-on yesterday, the weapon of choice being Twitter. Unfortunately, the weapon was an American one too. Of course in the bigger scheme of things, even in the smaller scheme, this was an insignificant spat. The war was fought at 140 characters at a time.

It was between South African blacks and African Americans.

First, a new twist on a story that our legal desk covered back in February: at the annual Ig Nobel awards ceremony earlier tonight, the Prize for Literature was awarded to the Garda Síochána na hÉireann (i.e. the Irish Police Force) for the 50 or more speeding tickets they've issued in the name "Prawo Jazdy", Polish for "driver's license."

And as if that wasn't enough onomastic excitement, the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for Veterinary Medicine was awarded for work reported in Bertenshaw, C. and Rowlinson, P., Exploring Stock Managers' Perceptions of the Human-Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production, Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People and Animals 22:1, pp. 59-69, 2009. Specifically, Dr. Bertenshaw and Dr. Rowlinson share the prize for their demonstration that (and here I quote from the article's abstract): "On farms where cows were called by name, milk yield was 258 liters higher than on farms where this was not the case (p < 0.001)."

Yet all this groundbreaking research leaves me with more questions than answers. What is the causal direction behind the correlation? And if my cow produced 238 liters too little milk, would I admit to the researchers the names I used for her? And how much milk can an Irish policeman get from a speeding Polish cow?

One of the most powerful pieces in the one-man exhibition of Chen Wen Ling now showing at Joy Gallery in Beijing 798 Art Zone is blandly entitled "What You See Might Not Be Real" in English, but the Chinese title is the raw and raunchy "FANG4PI4" 放屁 ("emit gas, break wind, flatulate, crepitate, i.e., fart [v.]"). Perhaps the artist didn't want to offend the linguistic sensitivities of potential foreign customers, but I must say that I much prefer to translate the title of the piece directly as "Fart," or, with a bit of license, as "Bull Fart" because the atomic cloud depicted by the artist is coming out of the anus of an enormous bovine.

On a very interesting and informative blog called "This is Xinjiang", we find the following sign over the entrance to an Ürümchi restaurant: