Hawaii's Science, Technology and New Media Community
Hazards of Machine Translation: Eat at the Server Error (yum!)
Having worked in the localization business its hard for me to fathom printing and posting an expensive sign based on machine translation, but I see it happen all the time both for English in Japan and Japanese in Hawaii. In Japan I once worked for a company that had a large professionally printed sign warning "Use not the door lest the portal consume you." I felt like a druid had just cursed me every time I walked by that area. Mika recently noticed a (American) surfer with a very impressive looking kanji tattoo that simply read "foot":
The moral to the story is: Use a professional translator for signs and tattoos, or at least ask a native speaking friend. If you live in Hawaii and don't have any Chinese or Japanese speaking friends then you need to get out more. :-)
Pat, thank you for sending us this link.
Tags: humor, japan, localization, machine translation
Comment
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Comment by Cameron Souza on July 23, 2008 at 7:33pm -
ROFL! An old version of Kingsoft QuickTrans seems to be the culprit in the obscene Chinese cases:
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Comment by Viil on July 23, 2008 at 8:22am - This made me cry from laughter :) ...it still does!
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Comment by Daniel Leuck on July 22, 2008 at 6:56pm -
Kevin just sent along this gem. It explains how a hanzi (Chinese character) with only three strokes and many meanings, one of which is "copulate", has lead to quite a few amusing signs in the country. Apparently a popular translation software package defaults to "fuck" as the meaning for this common character.
I also received a link to the opposite of Engrish.com, Hanzi Smatter - dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in western culture. Observe:
A very impressive looking tattoo reading "Power Piglet!"
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Comment by Mika Leuck on July 22, 2008 at 5:58pm -
Yes. Dan shows me postings on Engrish.com often >:-/. They are very funny, but it goes both ways!
I admit I laughed pretty hard at "Having Fun Prohibited", "Please don't accept stranglers invitation" and "Don't come to my bangolow house, understand, O.K. I hate all of you." I wonder if the last one sounded better in Malay.
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Comment by Alex on July 22, 2008 at 5:33pm -
well, I must say I am not too surrpised...have you seen www.engrish.com ?
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Comment by Truman Leung on July 22, 2008 at 11:10am - That's incredible and hilarious that they printed the error message on the huge sign. The Babel Fish programmer who wrote that error message would have a good laugh!
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Comment by Daniel Leuck on July 22, 2008 at 9:10am
- That would be a good save if someone inquired! The kanji for intestine also looks pretty cool but I wouldn't tattoo it on my arm. :-)
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Comment by J. David Beutel on July 22, 2008 at 8:30am - looks like a surfer: head, trunk, arm, riding a board down a wave
© 2010 Created by Daniel Leuck.
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