Card hair, and be careful to get an electric shock

October 22, 2020 @ 9:21 pm · Filed by under Lost in translation

« previous post | next post »

From a correspondent in the Washington DC area who doesn't go out much and wanted to enjoy a haircut at home without wearing a mask:
 
On the factory packaging for a new electric hair clipper that was just delivered by Amazon to an address in Virginia:
 
SECURITY
INTELLIGENT LIFE
TREND OF THE CHOICE
BRING YOU COMFORTABLE EXPERIENCE
 
and perhaps most mysterious of all, on the front of the box:
 
COMFORTABLE ENJOY
PEACE OF MIND NOT CARD HAIR
 
Not card hair?  I cannot help suspecting that someone has been translating from Chinese by selecting "English" on Google Translate and hitting the button.

The country of manufacture does not appear on the device or the packaging or the instruction leaflet ("Risk tip: Be careful to get an electric shock!"), but complaints are to be directed to jiangyanping8888@gmail.com — a potentially Chinese name, I figured.
 
If you could find out what "card hair" is, it will bring me peace of mind. Meanwhile I will be careful to get an electric shock.
 
I sympathize with the customer who bought this device that has so many questionable, and even potentially deadly, properties.  However, I can allay some of their qualms by verifying that, as they suspected, the puzzling descriptions and directions are almost certainly due to infelicitous translation from Chinese to Chinglish.
 
To solve the problem of how the scary wording "Be careful to get an electric shock!" came about, that is actually standard Chinglish for:
 
xiǎoxīn diànjí 小心电击 / 小心電擊 ("beware of electric shock" — more literally, "careful electric shock") OR dāngxīn chùdiàn 当心触电 / 當心觸電 ("beware of electric shock" — more literally, "careful / look out / pay attention to electric shock")
 
There are many examples of this type of usage under "Selected readings" below.
 
As for "not card hair", it must be some sort of transmutation of "without having to comb your hair", since shū (tóu)fǎ 梳头发 / 梳頭髮 might well in Chinglish be rendered as "card hair", where "card" signifies unsnarling / untangling / unraveling hair, fur, wool, etc. with a brush having wire bristles
 
Etymology
 
From Old French carde, from Old Occitan carda, deverbal from cardar, from Late Latin *carito, from Latin caro (“to comb with a card”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- (“to cut”).

Noun

card (countable and uncountable, plural cards)

    1. (uncountable, dated) Material with embedded short wire bristles.
    2. (dated, textiles) A comb– or brush-like device or tool to raise the nap on a fabric.
    3. (textiles) A hand-held tool formed similarly to a hairbrush but with bristles of wire or other rigid material. It is used principally with raw cotton, wool, hair, or other natural fibers to prepare these materials for spinning into yarn or thread on a spinning wheel, with a whorl or other hand-held spindle. The card serves to untangle, clean, remove debris from, and lay the fibers straight.
    4. (dated, textiles) A machine for disentangling the fibres of wool prior to spinning.
    5. A roll or sliver of fibre (as of wool) delivered from a carding machine.
Translations
±

Verb

card (third-person singular simple present cards, present participle carding, simple past and past participle carded)

    1. (textiles) To use a carding device to disentangle the fibres of wool prior to spinning.
    2. To scrape or tear someone’s flesh using a metal comb, as a form of torture.
    3. (transitive) To comb with a card; to cleanse or disentangle by carding.   to card a horse
    4. (obsolete, transitive, figurative) To clean or clear, as if by using a card.
    5. (obsolete, transitive) To mix or mingle, as with an inferior or weaker article.
Translations
±
 
 
While I have not seen the original language from which the directions and the description on the packaging were translated, I'm confident from the overall quality and nature of the wording that it was Chinese.
 
 
Selected readings

October 22, 2020 @ 9:21 pm · Filed by under Lost in translation


11 Comments

  1. David C. said,

    October 22, 2020 @ 10:36 pm

    It is 不卡頭髮 as in “your hair will not get caught in the blades”. Bought one of these myself because of the lockdown.

  2. TS said,

    October 22, 2020 @ 10:44 pm

    My guess: it comes from bùkǎ tóufa 不卡头发/不卡頭髮, where 卡 means "to get stuck", but this character can also mean "card" in other contexts. So, "jam free" -> "not card hair".

  3. Elizabeth J Barber said,

    October 22, 2020 @ 11:09 pm

    My all-time favorite, the famous sign in a tailor shop in China about a century ago, long before google-translate:
    LADIES HAVE FITS UPSTAIRS.

  4. Michael Watts said,

    October 23, 2020 @ 12:25 am

    "Risk tip: Be careful to get an electric shock!"

    I assume this should say "be careful of getting an electric shock".

    But these are the kinds of fine, arbitrary syntactic distinctions that feel like their main function is to be unfairly difficult for foreign speakers to remember. Which non-finite form of the verb goes in which construction?

  5. Michael Watts said,

    October 23, 2020 @ 12:27 am

    Illustrating the unfairness a little, note that a gerund ING-form and a to-infinitive are very often interchangeable!

  6. JJM said,

    October 23, 2020 @ 2:28 pm

    I myself ordered a hair clipper online and it turned out to be of Chinese manufacture (no surprise there). Let me be quite clear: it works perfectly well and I'm very, very satisfied with it.*

    However, though not as extreme as your example here, the English instructions were pretty badly done.

    I have this vision of the factory in China and a manger collaring some poor employee: "Chang, you're pretty good with languages, go translate these instructions into English for me!"

    * My barber won't be happy though. I take a simple Number One all over and now my wife has mastered the cut completely so no more money from me for haircuts.

  7. JJM said,

    October 23, 2020 @ 2:29 pm

    Sorry, not "manger" but "manager".

  8. 번하드 said,

    October 23, 2020 @ 7:59 pm

    Hmm, as a German the first thing that came to mind is a plant called "Karde" in German.
    English "teasel", Botanical "Dipsacus". Native to Europe/Asia/Northern Africa.
    Wikipedia has "[…] historically saw wide use in textile processing, providing a natural comb for cleaning, aligning and raising the nap on fabrics, particularly wool."
    Later replaced by a "carding machine" — aha.
    The Chinese word seems to be "锅菜" [ guōcài ]

    Ah, and "carding through hair" seems to be a thing. Probably a more direct/plausible explanation.

  9. Kaleberg said,

    October 23, 2020 @ 10:54 pm

    When I was a kid, we used to joke about the bad translations from the Japanese. The New Yorker often had little snippets of this. I can't remember many, though I still recall the phrase "while making the motion of up and down". English is inscrutable.

  10. Scott P. said,

    October 24, 2020 @ 10:48 am

    I assume this should say "be careful of getting an electric shock".

    But these are the kinds of fine, arbitrary syntactic distinctions that feel like their main function is to be unfairly difficult for foreign speakers to remember. Which non-finite form of the verb goes in which construction?

    I think the preposition here is the bigger culprit, as "be careful of get an electric shock" would be mostly comprehensible. The issue is the multitude of phrasal verbs in English, and the fact that "to be careful to" and " to be careful of" are opposed in meaning.

  11. Dara Connolly said,

    October 25, 2020 @ 5:28 pm

    "note that a gerund ING-form and a to-infinitive are very often interchangeable!"

    Another case where the meaning is distinct in a way that would be challenging for non-native speakers:
    "If the alarm sounds, do not stop to collect your personal belongings"
    "If the alarm sounds, do not stop collecting your personal belongings"

RSS feed for comments on this post