Archive for Lost in translation

Reclamation of a wasteland by an army unit

Jane Skinner received this from a friend who saw it in Chengdu, Sichuan:

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Subpar subtitles

This is a full length martial arts action movie (English title "Sword Master"). You probably won't be able to stand watching much of it, and you have to put up with some pretty atrocious fighting scenes, but if you stick around for a few minutes of the Chinglish subtitles, you'll find them to be quite bizarre, although most seem to be just poor automatic translation.

https://youtu.be/ImsxMek2XgI

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Exploit Africa

Happy and healthy year of the Pig!

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How about some delicious roasted husband, dear?

From Anand Mahindra's Twitter account:

https://twitter.com/anandmahindra/status/1090479366235213824

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"Do not accept Taiwan"

Sign at the high-end Chinese hotpot chain Haidilao:

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Explosive drinks

From Francis Miller in Xi'an, China:

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Chile has nuclear prunes

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Take Care To Fall Into Water

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Miscellaneous bacteria, part 2

From Diana S. Zhang, apropos of the recent post "Miscellaneous bacteria":

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Miscellaneous bacteria

Jeff DeMarco spotted this menu item at the Splendid China attraction in Shenzhen:

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Rude and unreasonable chicken

From June Teufel Dreyer:

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Please vomit here

Here we go again.  With the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics coming up, China aims to eliminate Chinglish, and all sorts of negative examples are adduced.  We've covered scores of them on Language Log, but here's one I hadn't seen before:

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China rules

For the last few weeks, the New York Times has been running a hyped-up, gushing series of lengthy articles under the rubric "China rules". On a special section in the paper edition for Sunday, November 25, they printed this gigantic headline in Chinese characters — and made a colossal mistake:

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