In the last couple of years at least, people have been forwarding photographs of signs, notices and menus in China (among other countries), written in incomprehensible English with hilarious results. The typos, while professionally unforgivable, are at least understandable in the sense that they might be due to a copy-typist who didn’t know any English at all. The original translation, however, is definitely unforgivable in most, if not all, of the cases--a lot of them read like the translator had looked up each word in the dictionary and cobbled the Chinese sentence together in English. In this day and age, there must be a Westerner somewhere in China one can approach to help out on this front. (Some friends suggested that they might have indeed consulted a Westerner but the Westerner had a wicked sense of humour, i.e., it’s more fun to keep the English all ungrammatical and a bit nonsensical.) The published author of a compilation of some of these Chinglish signs put forward a few theories in his foreword to try and explain this persistent lack of professionalism: one was the issue of face--someone in the firm might know a little English, so it’d be insulting to him/her to consult an outsider; the other was arrogance, with the translator thinking s/he knows enough not to have to consult an outsider.
However stupid that kind of attitude might be (that author’s theories feel right to me, someone who has seen a lot of Chinese behaviour in my 58 years as a Chinese), at least the poor English is produced in a non-English-speaking country. How does one, however, account for things like the following (just to name a few) found in London, the capital of the birthplace of the language:
Served with 2 Slice Bread (spotted in a café in Dalston)
2Egg & Chips (ditto)
Today Special (ditto)
Breakfast, lunch & dinners (ditto)
Fish and chip
Fish and chip
Advanced notice (about delays due to roadworks)
Male toilet (notably at Piccadilly Circus, which is full of visitors from abroad)
Female toilet (ditto)
(Holiday advert) Laying in the sun (spotted at Gatwick Airport, 05 Aug 2011)
All kind of mobile unlock (spotted in Hackney)
All kind ham (spotted in Hackney, 01 Nov 2011)
(Holiday advert) Laying in the sun (spotted at Gatwick Airport, 05 Aug 2011)
All kind of mobile unlock (spotted in Hackney)
All kind ham (spotted in Hackney, 01 Nov 2011)
There’s no excuse really, for, if one is not a native-speaker of English and needs to check one’s English for the signs cited above, there are even more native-speakers of English in London than in China. Or are there...??
(London, October/November 2011)
More:
More:
Do not speak to or obscure the driver's vision while the bus is moving (sign on Bus 253, spotted 13 Nov 2011)
About a set of conjoined twins: "When one has their eyes closed, the other has their eyes open." (heard on BBC Radio 4's programme of 15 Nov 2011)
I entirely share your surprise at how often foreign words on menus are misspelled. And all it would take these days is to enter the word in Google Translate. One does not even have to find a native speaker. I do not remember the last time I went to an Italian restaurant in the US without finding some misspelled words on the menu. Often I find the same word misspelled in two different ways on the same page. Apparently the double consonants are the most challenging. "Prosciutto" and "bruschetta" get butchered in a variety of ways. "Cannelloni" often loses one or both of the double consonants, "ossobuco" gets one s and/or two c's, and same with the l's and n's in "cannoli". "Panini" gets one or two extra n's. There is also the common addition of the "s" for plural in words that are already plural (it should be "one panino", "two panini", not "two paninis", "one gelato", "two gelati", but I guess this is understandable because the words have become anglicized and should no longer be considered Italian words). "Spaghetti alla puttanesca" is found misspelled even on the spaghetti sauce jars sold in grocery stores, and "spaghetti all' Amatriciana" is actually found misspelled as "alla Matriciana" even in Italy (the name of the town the sauce comes from is Amatrice, not Matrice).
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, using computer aided translation can also give hilarious results. This is a sign I found at a bed & breakfast in Lecce (Southern Italy) in 2003 (when of course computer translation was a lot worse than it is today):
"It begs each other to close the front door".
This was an attempt to translate the "Si" in the Italian "Si prega di chiudere il portone", that of course should be translated simply as "Please close the front door".
For the record, and as evidence of the progress of computer translation software, I just tried "Si prega di chiudere il portone" with Google Translate and it perfectly translated it as "Please close the door".