Language Log

Renowned broadcaster (and part-time word maven) John Humphrys gives a quick summary of the weather forecast just before the 7:30 news summary on the BBC Radio 4 "Today" program in the UK each morning; and what he said this morning was a classic of the genre: "Pretty miserable by and large." A charming example, I thought, of the tradition of extremely vague weather-forecast language in the blustery British Isles.

As reported by Der Spiegel and picked up by the New York Times blog The Lede, two German cartographers have created The Atlas of True Names, which substitutes place names around the world with glosses based on their etymological roots. It's a very clever idea, but in execution it enshrines some questionable notions of "truth."

If you were a foreigner walking down the street in a Chinese city and you passed the restaurant below, you would do a double-take, because the familiar KFC has morphed into KFG, and Colonel Sanders doesn't look quite right. But if you were a Chinese walking down the street and passed by the same restaurant, you would do a triple-take, because the familiar 肯德基 (KEN3 ["consent; agree; be willing"]DE2 ["virtue"]JI1["foundation; base"]), which is simply a phonetic transcription of "Kentucky," has become 啃他雞 (KEN3 ["nibble; gnaw"] TA1 ["he, him, his"] JI1 ["chicken"]), with a blatant double entendre on the last syllable (referring to the male of the species).

(Click the image to enlarge.)

Linguists occasionally encounter examples parallel to mistranslated signs like the one Mark wrote about. The situation arises when someone with little or no knowledge of the native language, typically an anthropologist, elicits information such as place names and writes down whatever the response is. When a linguist familiar with the language later reviews these records, some place name will prove to be uninterpretable until the linguist realizes that what has been recorded, usually in a garbled form, is the response "I don't know". There are various stories of this type in linguistic folklore, and I have encountered this myself.

I came across a variant of this in the census of a Carrier village carried out by Oblate priests, none of whom had much command of the language, in the 1870s. Several women are recorded as having been named tsandelh. What the priests didn't know is that tsandelh is not a name: it means "widow".

According to the BBC, the Swansea council should have gotten a second opinion on this road sign:

James Fallows has posted this subway ad, at the Dongsishitiao station of Beijing's Line 2, on the Atlantic website and raises a lot of interesting questions about it:

On a recycling dumpster outside an office building in Edinburgh: MIXED CARDBOARD ONLY. That, although it's subtle, is a case of the phenomenon for which I have been using the (not exactly ideal) term nerdview. It is an example of a linguistically misleading communication in which the failure is not of grammar or meaning but of failing to keep in mind the viewpoint of the reader rather than the specialist (possibly nerdy) view of the writer. Do you see why?

Earlier this year, we had some fun with a quirk of web-trained statistical MT that sometimes causes odd mistranslations of country names. This happens because information in parallel web pages is often localized rather than translated; some of the posts are "Made in USA == Made in Austria|France|Italy", 3/23/2008; "Austria == Ireland?", 3/24/2008;  "Why Austria is Ireland", 3/24/2008; "The (probable) truth about Austria and Ireland", 3/24/2008.

Most if not all of the examples we discussed then have been fixed, but a new case has turned up in Google Translate's mapping from Norwegian to English. The source is an interesting story in a Norwegian newspaper (Siril Herseth, "Obama «reddet» Mary – betalte reisen til Norge", 10/4/2008), which describes how, twenty years ago, Barack Obama acted as a good Samaritan in helping a stranger who was short of money in the Miami airport.

The article's title, put through Google Translate's Nowegian to English system, comes out as Obama "rescued" Mary – paid trip to Ireland.

Despite the FUWA ("good-luck dolls," "friendlies") mascot-goddesses in the "niches" below the sign, the translation is most inauspicious.

At Stansted Airport near the security checkpoints I saw a closet labeled CONTINGENCY DEPLOYMENT EQUIPMENT. I reflected awhile, as I put my belt and shoes back on after a very thorough body-fondling search, on the meaning of that remarkable sequence of Latinate lexical selections, and I decided that it meant "things to use if stuff happens". But of course that doesn't really distinguish the things in that closet from the things in almost any other closet. I wonder what was in there. Things that are either too heterogeneous to classify or too secret to openly name, evidently.

The distinguished German writing instrument manufacturer, Staedtler, lavished 19 (!) languages on the box for its Mars® Lumograph® 100 pencils.

(Click on the images for larger versions.)

Last night the movie Tremors 4: The Legend Begins was on TV. This is the prequel to the other three Tremors movies, and I had never seen it, so in the interest of learning the fictional-historical background, I watched it. For those lacking a classical education, the Tremors movies are about monstrous worm-like creatures known as "graboids" that emerge from underground to terrorize the population of the tiny desert town of Perfection, Nevada. A Chinese family figures prominently in Tremors 4, and from time to time one of them speaks Chinese. By dint of careful observation I am therefore able to report that the Chinese name for graboids is 土龍 tu³ long² "earth dragon".

P.S. I think that a Chinese dub of any of the Tremors series would be hysterically funny. Whether the film industry shares my sense of humor and will take on this project remains to be seen.

Is it Indian English? Perhaps, but Chinglish is a close second, and may already have overtaken the language of the angrejiwallahs (which actually consists of several dialects).

In this case, we're not talking about translation errors such as this colossal blunder, but about the unique pronunciation style of some Chinglish speakers. I'm happy to report that Randy Alexander, who has been teaching English for years in Jilin, China, tackles Chinglish pronunciation head-on in a lovely two-part essay posted at Beijing Sounds (Part 1 and Part 2). Randy's essay comes complete with sound files and pictures.