Civilized dog

« previous post | next post »

The large characters say:

wénmíng yǎng gǒu

文明养狗

"raise [your] dog [in a] civilized [manner]

This one is difficult for the machine translators to deal with.

The fine print says:

qǐng jíshí qīnglǐ chǒngwù páixiè wù

请及时清理宠物排泄物

"Please clean up your pet's excrement promptly"

The machine translators do a credible job with this one.

We've had countless variations on "civilization" + "urination / defecation" in the China department of Language Log.  See "Selected readings" for a bare sample.

Selected readings

Of the numberless relevant posts, these are just a few of my favorites.



2 Comments »

  1. Eugene N. Anderson said,

    January 4, 2025 @ 3:14 pm

    My dogs are thoroughly civilized. And, etymologically, they are patterned brightly.

  2. David Marjanović said,

    January 5, 2025 @ 8:42 am

    I first thought this could be like the following I've seen:

    UWAGA!
    DOBRY PIES
    ale ma słabe nerwy

    "DANGER!
    GOOD DOG
    but he has weak nerves"

RSS feed for comments on this post

Leave a Comment