{"id":2320,"date":"2010-05-13T09:50:09","date_gmt":"2010-05-13T13:50:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2320"},"modified":"2010-05-13T10:24:07","modified_gmt":"2010-05-13T14:24:07","slug":"dung-on-toast-cheese-on-toast-whatever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2320","title":{"rendered":"Dung on toast, cheese on toast, whatever"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Following up on <a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2295\">their recent article about Chinglish<\/a>, the NYT has a collection of \"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/interactive\/2010\/05\/11\/travel\/funny-signs.html\">Strange Signs From Abroad<\/a>\" contributed by readers, confirming that sign-makers in less far-away languages are also sometimes too trusting of dictionary entries in languages they don't know very well:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/StrangeSigns4.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"Click to embiggen\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/StrangeSigns4.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"475\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>If you look up <em>crottin<\/em> in the Concise Oxford-Hachette French-English Dictionary, you'll find:<\/p>\n<p>1. crottin <em>nom masculin<\/em><br \/>\n( de cheval ) dung<\/p>\n<p>And that's all. (Well, they did say it was concise.) Google Translate is even more concise: <em>crottin<\/em> \u2192 <em>dung<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>If you turn to the <span class=\"small1\">Pocket Oxford-Hachette French Dictionary, you do get a second (presumably figurative) sense:<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p>1. dung;<br \/>\n2. (small round) goat's cheese.<\/p>\n<p>But someone without much knowledge of English can be pardoned for believing what the dictionaries say, or at least what they say first, and translating <em>crottin de ch\u00e8vre sur toast<\/em> as \"goat dung on toast\".<\/p>\n<p>But English, though we do sometimes call horse droppings \"road apples\", we haven't made the figurative leap to small logs of goat cheese, and any native speaker would flag \"goat dung on toast\" as an unlikely ingredient for a salad.\u00a0 As in the case of the many amusing Chinglish mistakes, however,\u00a0 this translation was apparently not checked by anyone who knows much English.<\/p>\n<p>[By the way, in this case the context doesn't help Google Translate: <em>crottin de ch\u00e8vre sur toast<\/em> is rendered as \"goat dung on toast\".]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Following up on their recent article about Chinglish, the NYT has a collection of \"Strange Signs From Abroad\" contributed by readers, confirming that sign-makers in less far-away languages are also sometimes too trusting of dictionary entries in languages they don't know very well:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lost-in-translation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2320\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}