*BEEP* vegetables
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Chinglish makes an appearance in the "Translators" segment of HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (10/19):
For those who may have missed my old Language Log post, this classic Chinglishism was explained at great length and with many details in "The Etiology and Elaboration of a Flagrant Mistranslation" (12/9/07), with an update and refresher in "The further elaboration of a flagrant mistranslation".
Incidentally, a close variant of "Do Drunken Driving", the other Chinglish sign cited by John Oliver, was covered in "Don't Drive in the What, er?" (8/4/09).
Since both of these examples occur right at the beginning of this Last Week Tonight segment, you don't have to watch all 16:06 of it. But if you do stick with Oliver to the end, you'll realize that, despite all of the expected levity, he makes a strong plea for the crucial importance of good translators.
[Hat tip Ben Zimmer]
Rachel said,
October 22, 2014 @ 3:51 pm
The most interesting thing for me is the way "translator" is used. As I learned it, a translator does written translation; someone who does oral translation is an interpreter. It feels, though, that as the job is becoming more well known, both jobs are getting subsumed under "translator".
Goofy said,
October 22, 2014 @ 8:39 pm
Is there a problem with some of the Arabic script words?
Ray Dillinger said,
October 23, 2014 @ 8:50 am
When we provided translation software (script to script translation) the customers simply assumed that it must also provide interpretation (audio to audio translation) and would complain mightily and file bug reports if it did not. This despite the fact that we were always very up front about the software NOT being capable of handling audio. (This is about ten years ago.) So I would say your observation about people presuming that it is "the same job" or that both tasks are part of the job, is accurate.
Speech to speech is at least an order of magnitude harder to do with any accuracy, and we were never actually all that happy with the quality of text to text translation. Certainly Google translate is doing just as good a job these days despite its occasional gaffe. Our software would stumble and fall whenever someone used a non-grammatical construction. And despite having very complete formal grammars for English and French, we could never *EVER* capture all the ways the languages were casually used in speech. One reason we were ever able to do text to text translation was because as a rule people write much more grammatically than they speak.
ZZMike said,
November 1, 2014 @ 7:49 pm
Those darn traitors! (Especially the Monty Python ones.)