Language Log

Daniel Waugh sent in the following eight photographs taken between 1995 and 2009. Since they are all related to his travels in the Xinjiang region and thence down into India, I have decided to treat them as a set.

Dan explains:

The first three are from a men's room at the Gez checkpoint on the Karakorum Highway (KKH) south of Kashgar. Also, for decor above urinals, see the one at the end of the batch (this one at the Ai cave site), with a photograph of Mt. Rainier (but no signs as to where to point what you are doing…). The snake warning sign is along the path above Lake Kanas in the northern tip of Xinjiang. I think its real intent was to keep people from trampling the not so wild (they apparently have been planted) wild flowers. The last couple are not so much for linguistic analysis, though I think the "marriage reassembling" is an interesting concept. That one was taken in Delhi. The "relax" sign is in one of those precipitous stretches of the KKH above the Hunza Valley just before you get to Karimabad (Baltit). I was riding a mountain bike along that stretch of the road.

What the hell kind of language has a one-syllable difference between "Gracious welcome to our honored guests" and "Your king ingests every possible secretion from all the mammals of our world"?

Seldom in the history of intergalactic travel have there been worse translation screw-ups. But I've been thinking…

Xiang Li took a photo of this sign while she was in Chengdu, Sichuan recently:

I've been reading way too much Victor Mair. In the restaurant of my hotel in London I just saw an English girl wearing a T-shirt on which it said this:

And I immediately thought, who is Ho Pe?

Here is a closeup of a remarkable work of installation art that is being shown at this year's Venice Biennale:

The following restaurant sign in Uyghur and Chinese was sent in by Fangyi Cheng:

With three different kinds of paper, no less. Last week I spent a couple of days at a hotel in the Hague. In the elevator, there were advertisements for the hotel's restaurant, featuring among other things a dish described in English as

SHELLFISH SOUP WITH THREE TYPES OF PAPER WITH THE INGREDIENTS OF RUST

The Dutch version confirmed my guess that the "rust" was rouille:

EEN BISQUE VAN SCHAALDIEREN MET DRIE SOORTEN PAPIER VAN DE INGREDIËNTEN VAN ROUILLE

Rouille does mean "rust" in French, but in this context it would be translated into English as into Dutch as "rouille" — as Wikipedia explains, it's

… a sauce that consists of olive oil with breadcrumbs, garlic, saffron and chili peppers. It is served as a garnish with fish, fish soup and, notably, bouillabaisse.

On the Wall Street Journal's Emerging Europe blog, Emre Peker reports on a case of linguistic chicanery, with none other than Noam Chomsky as its victim.

Coming from Noam Chomsky, the following sentences may look as if the famed American linguist was seeking to develop a new syntax: “While there have been tampered with, sometimes with the Republic of Turkey won democracy. It ruled democratic elections.”

Except they didn’t belong to Mr. Chomsky, but to an imaginative Turkish newspaper, while the quotes appear to have been translated into English using Google’s translation tool.

On August 27, Turkish daily Yeni Safak, or New Dawn, published a front page article headlined–“The Arab Spring Has Now Found Its True Spirit”–which it claimed was based on an e-mailed exchange with Mr. Chomsky. The interview, which was conducted in English and centered on the crisis in Egypt, had taken place two weeks previously, the story said.

According to Yeni Safak, the renowned antiwar activist spent a considerable part of the exchange defending policies parallel to those of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The newspaper also cited several answers by the world’s most famous linguistics professor in unintelligible English.

“This complexity in the Middle East, do you think the Western states flapping because of this chaos? Contrary to what happens when everything that milk port, enters the work order, then begins to bustle in the West. I’ve seen the plans works,” Mr. Chomsky allegedly said in an answer to one question.

The text, however, flows perfectly in Turkish. Plugging the Turkish content into Google Translate shows that Mr. Chomsky was left uttering phrases like “milk port”–a direct translation of an idiom derived from sailing that means “calm.”

"Frazz", Sept. 4, 2013:

From "Zits" for August 30, 2013 — the episode just before the one featured in "Earworms and white bears":

Quincy Lu sent in the following photograph of a menu taken by his wife at a Hunan restaurant in Fremont, California (click to embiggen):

For the last week, the whole Chinese world was transfixed by the trial of Bo Xilai, the fallen star of the Chinese Communist Party.  Among the lurid details of crime and corruption that emerged, perhaps none has elicited greater excitement than Bo's revelation that his wife, Gu Kailai (already convicted of the murder of a British businessman named Neil Heywood), and his "top cop", Wang Lijun (already convicted of treachery and treason), carried out an illicit love affair.

The expressions Bo used to describe the romance between his wife and his chief of police have challenged the translation skills of China's journalists.

We've often written about horrendous Chinese tattoo blunders on Language Log (with a general survey here), there is a whole website dedicated to them, and now BuzzFeed offers a generous assortment of "34 Ridiculous Chinese Character Tattoos Translated". All of the photographs are great, and many of the translations are serviceable, some even inspired, but several of them are wrong or could be improved. I won't go through all 34, and indeed, I've already covered at least one of them on Language Log, but will concentrate on a few that are particularly interesting.