Please forgive to be incontinent
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I forget who sent this photograph to me, but it is a prime specimen of first-class Chinglish:
The Chinese reads:
nèibù zhuāngxiū zhōng 内部装修中 ("under renovation")
gěi nín dài lái bùbiàn 给您带来不便 ("for the inconvenience it brings you [honorific]")
jìng qǐng liàngjiě 敬请谅解 ("please excuse")
There are two especially humorous aspects to the main translation error:
- the biàn 便 here is short for fāngbiàn 方便 ("convenient"), or, more precisely, the bùbiàn 不便 here is short for bù fāngbiàn 不方便 ("inconvenient"), which somehow came out as "incontinent"
- this is particularly unfortunate, inasmuch as there is an undertone of the biàn 便 standing for dàbiàn 大便 ("big convenience", i.e., "defecation") and xiǎobiàn 小便 ("small convenience", i.e., "urination"), a usage that we have discussed many times on Language Log and that goes back to Sanskrit.
chris said,
October 12, 2015 @ 8:06 pm
If you don't know the Chinese there's a quite different interpretation available: "forgive" is a mistake for something like "forgo" or "forbear", the rest are just the sort of awkward unidiomatic synonyms you'd expect from a translation, and the sign is telling you not to "decorate" the floor.
Although I suppose if you actually saw the evidence of the ongoing renovation, that might push interpretation toward something to do with that.