This one almost drove me nuts.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Marc Sarrel sent me the following message:<\/p>\n
My wife and I have have found a strange translation from Chinese to English, and would be interested if you could help explain.\u00a0 We recently bought a nebulizer, from Amazon in the US, for my wife\u2019s asthma.\u00a0 It came with the following set of instructions.\u00a0 Once of the parts is referred to as the \u201cRodent Spigot.\u201d\u00a0 See the first figure, and several places in the text.\u00a0 We would have just called it a mouthpiece.\u00a0 You can see a photo of the rodent spigot on the side of the box.<\/p>\n
Do you have any explanation of how such a translation might have been made?\u00a0 All the text on and inside the box is in English.\u00a0 We do not have the original Chinese.\u00a0 The outside of the box says \u201cMade in China,\u201d but doesn\u2019t tell what region or city.<\/p>\n
We were quite puzzled and amused by the term, and would appreciate any isight you could give.<\/p>\n
Since there is no Chinese anywhere in the materials that Marc sent, there's no point in my posting the pictures here, but you can easily find them online if you're interested, such as here<\/a> (similar to the model that Marc and his wife purchased — see toward the bottom of the page) and here<\/a> (you can see the parts — including the rodent spigot — labeled on several diagrams as you scroll down the page):<\/p>\n If I have the original Chinese to consult, I can almost always figure out what went wrong in short order when somebody asks me about garbled Chinglish.\u00a0 But in this case, I only had the mangled English.<\/p>\n The first thing I did was to check how often this mistake occurs.<\/p>\n A Google search for \"rodent spigot\" yields 1,780 ghits, so it wasn't a one-off.\u00a0 Since it occurs so often, I thought I would be able to figure it out without too much difficulty, despite the fact that I didn't have the Chinese original to work with.<\/p>\n I won't describe in detail all the hell I've been through for the last three hours, but I'll just mention a few of the tactics and sources I used to try to figure out how this mistranslation arose:<\/p>\n 1. YouTube videos showing how to use these devices<\/p>\n 2. charts and diagrams<\/p>\n 3. instruction manuals<\/p>\n 4. advertisements (hundreds of them)<\/p>\n 5. dozens of online dictionaries<\/p>\n 6. massive Google searches attacking the problem from every imaginable angle<\/p>\n 7. research into laboratory mice and guinea pig water bottles<\/p>\n 8. hookah and plumbing terminology<\/p>\n 9. user reports and blogs that expressed dismay and amusement at the term \"rodent spigot\" (as well as much merriment over other aspects of the Chinglish instructions), but nobody made an effort to explain how they came about<\/p>\n etc., etc.<\/p>\n A big problem was that, even on Chinese websites, the drawings and instructions all seemed to be in English!\u00a0 Another problem was that everybody seemed to be copying from everybody else, so since somebody came up with the outlandish term \"rodent spigot\", everybody else just started copying it.<\/p>\n After about two and a half hours, I started to get very frustrated, and after another half hour I began to panic, which almost never happens to me.\u00a0 I was afraid that this was one I'd have to give up on.\u00a0 I'd just have to admit that I was defeated by \"rodent spigot\".<\/p>\n Stubborn as I am, though, I decided I'd \"just\" check a few more places.<\/p>\n