Friday, August 01, 2008

Funny English Translation errors!

For an hour of great fun, check out engrish.com, a great collection of hilarious Oriental-to-English translation errors.


WTF? from engrish.com

The syntax of Chinese and Japanese makes it extremely difficult to translate, and I have great difficultly communicating with my oriental friends. Several of my books have been translated into Japanese, Korean and Chinese, and when I get questions (in Kanji), they assume that I speak their language! It's weird, having written books that I cannot read.


Oh, Jolly Old Engrand . . . . from engrish.com

I do my best, with Babelfish, but that’s not always enough. Once, I translated a readers question into English, and the gentleman’s name translated into “pan hundred forests”. I used this in my salutation for the response (Hi Pan Hundred Forests), only to receive a hateful e-mail back, accusing me of mocking his good name! Sometimes you cannot win!


Good Crap from engrish.com


Kanji is Cool!

When our daughter Jenny was a teenager, she liked to wear t-shirts with Kanji characters, it did not matter what it said, she thought that it was very cool because it was Kanji.

However, it always disturbed me that she had NO IDEA what the letters meant, and I often wondered if the Chinese people were making them say funny things.

It was sort of like this, where this Chinese man gets a cool tattoo with those neat European characters: