Language Log

News sources around the world reported recently on a tragedy — "Officials: Chinese Ambassador to Israel Found Dead in Home", Associated Press 5/17/2020:

JERUSALEM — The Chinese ambassador to Israel was found dead in his home north of Tel Aviv on Sunday, Israel’s Foreign Ministry said.

Israeli Police Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the ambassador's death was believed to be from natural causes.

Du Wei, 58, was appointed envoy in February in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. He previously served as China’s envoy to Ukraine. He was found dead at the ambassador's official residence in Herzliya.

But if you read it on Israel Hayom (or other Hebrew sources) via Google Translate, you'll get a different picture:

Two years on, and still my favourite Chinese mistranslation…. pic.twitter.com/0EHeQjybeB

— Antiokhos among the Angles (@AntiokhosE) May 6, 2020

From Paul Shore:

I don't know whether the item below, an Amazon translation of an Amazon customer review, is Language-Log-worthy; but I thought that at the very least you might be amused by its sublime anti-logic.  The January 1, 2017 review, written by "横川いずみ", is of Freedom Betrayed, Herbert Hoover's massive, radical critique of U.S. foreign relations from the thirties to the fifties, which wasn't published until 2011, roughly a half-century after Hoover completed it.  In the heading, 横川いずみ rates the book five stars out of five and "[v]ery good".  The Japanese original of the review text is as follows:

[This is a guest post by Cyrus Shaoul]

I am a long time LL reader and I came across an interesting machine translation error today.

When my Japanese friend sent me this sentence:

62年前のこの日に慶應義塾大学病院で命を授かりました。

I was flummoxed by the verb 授かる [VHM:  sazukaru {"be gifted / endowed with (an award / title); to be blessed (e.g., with a child); be granted / taught; to be given something of great value / a treasure, by deities or someone of higher social class"}] at the end of the sentence, so I asked Google Translate for help and lo and behold, it said:

"On this day, 62 years ago, I died at Keio University Hospital."

From Jeff DeMarco:

I hit the translation button for this Facebook post and this is what I got!

Joe Tello sent me this funny sign:

The line of Chinese at the top says "àomàn yóu 傲慢鱿" ("arrogant squid").  That's puzzling enough by itself, but I actually found the English to be even more mystifying.  It seems to be telling us that this place is in the East Location of the Southwest District of North Texas.  When I try to figure out on a map of Texas where that would put it, my imagination fails me.

Sign in an Indian airport:

[This is a guest post by Thomas Lee Mair]

"It May Be the Biggest Tax Heist Ever. And Europe Wants Justice." NYT 1/23/2020:

Martin Shields and Paul Mora met in 2004, at the London office of Merrill Lynch. […]

Today, the men stand accused of participating in what Le Monde has called “the robbery of the century,” and what one academic declared “the biggest tax theft in the history of Europe.” From 2006 to 2011, these two and hundreds of bankers, lawyers and investors made off with a staggering $60 billion, all of it siphoned from the state coffers of European countries.

The scheme was built around “cum-ex trading” (from the Latin for “with-without”): a monetary maneuver to avoid double taxation of investment profits that plays out like high finance’s answer to a David Copperfield stage illusion. Through careful timing, and the coordination of a dozen different transactions, cum-ex trades produced two refunds for dividend tax paid on one basket of stocks.

One basket of stocks. Abracadabra. Two refunds.

You can learn more about this from the source at  cumex-files.com. But since this is Language Log rather than Evil Bankers Log, I'm going to focus on the claim that "cum-ex" is from the Latin for "with-without".

J. Edward Moreno, "Facebook apologizes after Chinese president's name translated into vulgar phrase", The Hill (1/18/20) — with screen capture in Burmese and English.

Poppy McPherson, "Facebook says technical error caused vulgar translation of Chinese leader's name", Reuters (1/18/20):

YANGON (Reuters) – Facebook Inc (FB.O) on Saturday blamed a technical error for Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s name appearing as “Mr Shithole” in posts on its platform when translated into English from Burmese, apologizing for any offense caused.

From Tarashare:

Bruce Rusk sent in this photograph taken at his local (Vancouver) Hong Kong-style congee joint: the English translation of the third item on the menu reads the Sinographs 龍崗 (lit., "dragon hillock / mound / [lookout] post / sentinel / sentry") as a Japanese toponym or family name, when they should be read in Cantonese (as the name of a neighborhood in Shenzhen, he believes).

Fuchsia Dunlop has a real talent for finding these things (cf. "Explosion Cheese Durian Pie" [9/23/19]):