Dec 12 2007
Lost in translation
All of the signs above appear in stores and buffets in mainland China. No, the Chinese are not trying to offend their English-speaking visitors, or convulse them in laughter. What is really going is the use of poorly-designed language translation software by people with no knowledge of English.
The confusion comes from several Chinese characters which have been represented in digitally by one character, the one which looks like a “T” with two cross-bars (干). The original characters have many different meanings, such “dry”, “do”, “undertake”, “be rude, impolite”, and many others, including, I guess, “fuck”.
I have never studied language translation algorithms and have no idea how they work, but were I writing one and I had a character or word with many different meanings, only one of which was “fuck”, I would probably cause the algorithm to pick another word.
This, and countless other examples of computerized mistranslations, point up that the human capacity for language is rich, deep and subtle, and for all our advances in modeling the real world digitally and logically in computer software, we are a very long way from doing it well.
(From the Language Log, via Making Light).
Update 14 Dec.:
Hmmm, the Chinese character discussed above displays perfectly on my Mac, but displays as a question mark (”?”) on my PC.
Oy. For some reason, the phrase “the shrimp fucks the cabbage” is going through my head like a children’s song. (A quasi-farmer in the dell theme, to be exact).
This is too funny. You should put this in humor! Oh my Gosh I’m dieing!
I think I might tweet about this one. I love funny stuff.