Chinese tattoos
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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.
N.B.: for each item, I give Hanyu Pinyin romanization | Chinese characters | BuzzFeed English translation | notes and / or revised translation in parentheses.
zhūròu yóu jiān de mǐ 豬肉油煎的米 "rice fried by pork fat" (unidiomatic Chinese translation for "pork fried rice", which should be zhūròu chǎofàn 猪肉炒饭, ròusī chǎofàn 肉丝炒饭, etc.)
xiōng'è fàn shīrén 凶恶犯詩人 "meanie crime poet" (the xiōng'è fàn 凶恶犯 ["vicious criminal"] seems to be written over a preexisting shīrén 詩人["poet"])
fushǒu 夫手 "husband hands" (on the biceps of a soccer player; the English is taken straight from Google Translate, but I think that the intention may have been to write a short form of gōngfu shǒu 功夫手 ["Kung Fu skill / hand / adept"])
kěyǐ 可以 "can do / okay" (on the arm of a basketball player; a more idiomatic Chinese rendering of "can do" would be bàn dédào 辦得到 or kěyǐ zuò 可以做)
hóu 猴 "monkey" (on the arm of a ripped tennis player, but there's probably nothing wrong with this since it might be considered his zodiacal sign; Marat Safin was born on January 20, 1980, which loosely may be thought of as belonging to a monkey year, though technically, according to the Chinese lunar calendar, the monkey year of that year ran from 16 February 1980 – 4 February 1981 and January 20, 1980 belonged to a goat year)
shén xìnyòng 神信用 "god credit" (the English is taken straight from Google Translate, but I think that the intention may have been to give a Chinese version of "in God we trust", which would be better translated as wǒmen xìnyǎng / xìnfèng / xiāngxìn shàngdì 我们信仰/相信/信奉上帝)
Lesson to be learned: never get a Chinese tattoo unless you first consult a licensed Sinologist to determine that what is about to be permanently ingrained on your hide will not make you a laughingstock for the rest of your life.
[hat tip to Jamie Fisher]
Faith said,
August 3, 2013 @ 10:28 pm
And then there's this: http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/And-this-tattoo-is-an-old-English-proverb-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i9651649_.htm
trelawney said,
August 4, 2013 @ 1:19 am
Do you know anyone that would undertake a similar translation for a tattoo I got in Arabic? It's supposed to be my name, but this Egyptian guy I met told me it basically means 'Fuck him/it' .
Cue sad trombone…
Circe said,
August 4, 2013 @ 4:09 am
It seems people have already made a business out of this. This website, for example, claims to verify proposed Sanskrit tattoos for correctness and even carries a section titled "common errors".
Victor Mair said,
August 4, 2013 @ 7:48 am
@trelawney
Send me a clear photograph of your tattoo and I'll look into it.
Tom Scocca said,
August 4, 2013 @ 7:49 am
The basketball player with the 可以 tattoo wasn't looking to say "can do"; his name is Sean May. Presumably he asked for his name, and ended up with "may," the verb.
Anschel said,
August 4, 2013 @ 9:32 am
About the zodiac thing: Japan uses the same zodiac as China (at least in terms of the characters used to represent the animals) but starts the year on January 1. So maybe the monkey guy was using a Japanese zodiac chart?
Daniel said,
August 4, 2013 @ 10:41 am
@Anschel: The character for "monkey" used in the tattoo is 猴, which is the normal character for monkey in Chinese but not in Japanese. When referring to the animal, the normal character for J. saru "monkey" is 猿, but when writing about the zodiac year the cyclical character 申 would be more usual.
I was amused to see C. huanguan 宦官 translated as "emperor's clerk". This is possible as a somewhat clumsy quasi-literal rendering of the characters, but the tattoo's owner would presumably be still more embarrassed to learn that the most natural interpretation of this word is "eunuch".
abc said,
August 4, 2013 @ 11:06 am
I find the things that people want to say somewhat more questionable then their translations. If you're going to get something mundane like your name or "in god we trust", why not just get it in English to begin with?
Victor Mair said,
August 4, 2013 @ 12:48 pm
@Tom Scocca:
MAYbe….
Victor Mair said,
August 4, 2013 @ 1:43 pm
@abc
I agree with you to a certain extent, but people tend to believe that the medium itself if powerful, even if they don't understand it at all. The medium is the message. In my next post, about Sanskrit and Arabic tattoos, I will address this question at greater length.
Matt said,
August 4, 2013 @ 7:35 pm
”凶恶犯詩人" is a calque of "Thug Poet", surely. What would be a more natural rendition? Is there a widely accepted standard translation of Tupac's "Thug Life"?
richardelguru said,
August 5, 2013 @ 6:10 am
And anyway "vicious criminal poet" is quite poetic, and I'm sure I've read stuff by at least one of them…
julie lee said,
August 5, 2013 @ 10:36 am
@Daniel:
Interesting that 申 sin (in Pinying romanization) is "monkey" in the Japanese zodiac.
"Sin" ("monkey" in Japanese zodiac) is very close in sound to French singe "monkey", as well as Latin simia, Greek simos, Spanish simia, all words meaning monkey.
申 is also a character for a day in the ancient Chinese calendar. And it would be the name of a heavenly constellation. 申 with an animal radical (semantic classifier) may also mean monkey in Chinese. I'm traveling right now, and don't have Chinese dictionaries at hand.
julie lee said,
August 5, 2013 @ 10:54 am
@Daniel
申 sin ("monkey" in Japanese) also means "monkey" in the Chinese zodiac.
julie lee said,
August 5, 2013 @ 11:53 am
申 is pronounced "sin" (like English "sin") in many Chinese dialects or regional speeches, including Sichuanese and Hunanese; it's pronounced "sun" (like English "sun") in Cantonese and "shen" (Pinyin) in Mandarin.
Daniel Barkalow said,
August 5, 2013 @ 12:58 pm
Seeing the number of these that are mirror-reversed, I think it would be great for an appropriate person to get a tattoo of "救护车" backwards.
Dan Lufkin said,
August 5, 2013 @ 8:09 pm
Just for the sake of symmetry, are there any Chinese palindromes?
chris said,
August 6, 2013 @ 12:17 pm
Plenty of palindrome in Chinese, 街市街 (market street) is one example comes to my mind