www.boingboing.net/2008/07/15/chinese-restaurant-c.html
I'm not sure what Chinese string this restaurateur fed to the translation software used to to generate the giant sign hanging over the entrance, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't: TRANSLATE SERVER ERROR. Ah, the special problems of translations into other alphabets.
July 15, 2008 10:21 PM God damn that's absurdly fucking funny. I love anyone that will go out buy a huge banner and put it up without even checking that it's nearly correct let alone spelt correctly.
Even when it's in your language and the sign is for your business. As a former purveyor / designer of large displays like this... the amount of client-proofed-approved-printed fuckups were atronomical. You'd think you'd notice that your business name had one too many letters or your phone number was wrong. And yes, I had instances where clients were happy just to accept my rushed-to-pre-proof Google translation (or even better: AltaVista's BabelFish) without actually running it by someone familiar with the language. I wish I knew some of the fuckups that came out of those jobs.
Our local supermarket had a sign on one aisle for "Fuck Goods"... The problem there is that in Simplified Chinese a word for 'dry' and an all-purpose 'to do' word are mapped to the same character. You can 'do' someone in Chinese the same as you can in English and it's just as crass a way of saying it, but for some reason auto-translation software seems to like that usage.
July 16, 2008 1:34 AM I can't help but wonder if there's someone walking around with a similar message tattooed on themselves in Chinese ideograms... The moral is: never try to put across a message in a language you don't understand, at least not without checking with a person familiar with that language first.
July 16, 2008 2:26 AM The Beiing Speaks Foreign Languages program has been trying to eliminate poorly translated signs all over the city before the Olympics. In Singapore, the Speak Good English Movement is trying to eradicate Singlish (a mix of English, Malay, Tamil and Mandarin and commonly spoken), and replace it with British colloquialisms, for example: Wrong: Die, Die must finish.
July 16, 2008 2:36 AM This happens everywhere, in Asia (Japan & China) especially. A large part of the problem is like Aeon said- it's the people who program tranlator software improperly or too narrowly, and secondly (most important), the people going with the spelling DON'T PROOFREAD. Often, they just don't have access to a foreign speaking person to double check it! There are some, though, who put things like this into English (for example) because it just "looks cool! They aren't worried so much about seeing someone call them on it. I sometimes give my students the spelling of a word, write it ON THE BOARD, say "this is how you spell ---", and 5 minutes later, I still see them writing something not even close. They have the spelling of words right in front of them on paper, copying a sentence, and they still get it wrong.
July 16, 2008 4:05 AM #9 Bubbleman: As pointed out by #4 Noah, the Chinese part literally means "dining hall". Not the most imaginative name for a restaurant, but at least the translation was wrong and the Chinese name isn't really TRANSLATE SERVER ERROR... In official and business use, fair enough, but the movement attempts to stomp out its use at an informal spoken level and on local TV shows as well, which is really ridiculous.
July 16, 2008 8:49 AM Knowing somebody with the actual knowledge of the language not necessarily helps. I knew an American who decided that he wanted a T-shirt with a Russian inscription. He lived in Brooklyn, so he simply went to the first Russian shop he encountered in the Coney Island area and asked a salesperson to write down some cool Russian slogan for him. Then, he neatly designed the words that they wrote for him, and made himself a T-shirt.
July 16, 2008 11:01 AM What probably happened here is that when they entered the characters for translation and hit the translate button there was an issue with the translation software. So the resulting error message was 'TRANSLATE SERVER ERROR' instead of the requested translation - classic.
July 16, 2008 12:50 PM Like #11 says, this seems just like the flipside of people getting Chinese character tattoos that are supposed to say "Peace thru Strength" but really says something like "I want to massage your grandmother."
it passed HB 03-1197 State board of accountancy - accountant-client privilege - attest function - exceptions. APPROVED by Governor April 29, 2003 EFFECTIVE August 6, 2003 Okay, I'm done searching now.
July 16, 2008 9:22 PM At restaurants, you have a server, who is your waitron; When the server does not understand your language you may get a translation error. Translation server error could result in the delivery of dishes you did not order!
July 16, 2008 10:45 PM @#24 The Chinese translation of Translation server error is: I suggest you get the tattoo immediately rather than wait as common sense may yet get the better of you.
July 20, 2008 11:45 AM This reminds me of the name of the factory close to my father's factory in New Delhi, India. I did a double take when I first saw the name "psycho engineering". Nobody really knew the meaning of the word and they all pronounced it pyko.
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