Language Log

From Florent Moncomble, a language academic in France:

My father came back recently from a trip to Japan and was intrigued by the following notice, which he found in his Tokyo hotel room one day. He gets by in English but could not make out its meaning and was wondering whether the fault lay with him or with the message — obviously the latter is the case. My interpretation is that this sign is left by the cleaning staff to apologise whenever they are unsure whether or not to dispose of (half-)used equipment such as towels and toiletries, and leave them in the room.

From Steve Kass:

My brother is traveling in Portugal and posted this on Instagram. That’s all I know.

Kyle Gorman stumbled upon something strange happening to the Wikipedia article on "List of blacklisted keywords in China".  The first item under "General concepts" is mínzhǔ 民主 , which means "democracy".  However, what Kyle saw there as the definition yesterday was "chicken nuggets".  After he told me about it, I went there and saw the same thing:  "chicken nuggets".

Liwei Jiao sent me the following photograph of a framed picture that he bought:

Nathan Hopson spotted this on Facebook:

Over the past few days the British media (newspapers and BBC news programs) have been talking about a crucially linguistic argument that President Obama is being manipulated, and literally told what to say, by the UK prime minister's office. (Links seem superfluous: the Google News UK edition will give you thousands of references.) The evidence comes from a single choice of lexical item.

During the two working days Obama spent in Britain, the main news-generating event was a news conference in which he directly addressed the issue of whether the UK should remain in the European Union or leave it. A key argument for those who believe in leaving the EU (the proponents of Brexit) has been that new trade agreements could readily be set up once the country was free from the shackles of EU membership. Specifically, a trade agreement could be readily set up with the USA. Not so fast, said Obama: the USA will continue its negotiating efforts aimed at setting up a trade agreement with the whole EU, and if the UK left that grouping (the largest single market in the world) it would "be in the back of the queue" if it applied to get a special UK/US trade agreement established.

The Brexit crew jumped on the use of the word queue. Americans talk about waiting in line, not waiting in a queue or queueing up. "The back of the queue" is characteristic British English, and no American would say any such thing, they insisted. Obama's remarks must have been prepared for him by British pro-EU politicians. Are the Brexiteers right?

Here is a nice piece of Japanglish from Joseph Williams:

Posted on imgur:

Name of a restaurant in Xinyi District, Taipei, Taiwan:

shāngxīn suānlà fěn 傷心酸辣粉

In English, the restaurant calls itself "Sad Super Hot Noodles".

Victor Steinbok sent in the following photograph:

(Source)

This picture shows the main entrance to a public agency office in Qufu, home town of China's greatest philosopher of government, Confucius.

Notice on the New York MTR:

At first I was going to call this "Lost and found in translation", but since it was lost but never found, I thought I'd change that to "Found and lost in translation".  That sounded weird, so I just went for the title at the top:  "Translation of a translation".  Now I'm thinking that maybe I should have called it "From bad to worse".