Black Mighty Sub-Package

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From Mia in Shenzhen, China:

The Chinese name of this product on the label is:

hēimài tízi bāo 黑麦提子包 ("rye raisin loaf")

The translator misparsed the string of characters as:

hēi màití zǐbāo 黑麦提子包 ("black mighty subpackage")

In this case, the mistranslation was carried out with the help of Google Translate, which renders the string as "Black Metty subpackages".

Another product in the same store is labeled thus:

The Chinese name on the label of this product is:

liàolǐ juàn 料理卷 ("wraps"*)

(*That's my tentative translation.  I can't actually see enough of the product to determine what it really is.)

Google Translate gives "cuisine volume"

Bing Translator has "cooking volume"

Baidu Fanyi and iciba offer "food volume"

These perplexing tags were found in the bakery section of a local supermarket, more precisely, in the Olé Supermarket OLE 超市 in the Yitian Holiday Plaza 益 田假日广场.

Note from Mia:

"Sorry for the bad photo quality, but the shop staff was paranoid and forbade me from sticking around to take better photos."



1 Comment

  1. kktkkr said,

    April 20, 2015 @ 12:51 am

    I find the translation of 料理卷 interesting because 卷 is (Mandarin) juan2 for "roll" and juan4 for "scroll", so the two interpretations involved can be distinguished in speech, but the translation engines don't consider "cuisine" to be sufficient context to choose the correct meaning.

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