A fast ether lord fucking net ascending
Another popular topic here in the Spirit Smoking Lounge: Chinglish.
That was pretty much our whole weekend. Tequila shots and group readings of Chinglish. Like this menu:
Did you know that in China there’s a supermarket with an entire aisle devoted to Assorted Fuck?
I can’t wait for the 2008 Olympics.
11 Responses to “A fast ether lord fucking net ascending”
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Victoria says:
It really seems like people could get hurt, trying to follow those directions. Whether from laughing or plugging things together that perhaps should not be connected.
That said, I once had a whole website devoted to fine examples of the botching of English (as botched by those for whom it is, presumably, a first language). I’m still saving TV screen captures for whenever I get around to reviving that project. Most recent: when the local news captioned some law enforcement chap as being a representative of the “poolice department.” (Since which time, of course, I have taken to using this very language… just like when the letter “L” went out at the local Big Lots store and, naturally, we began referring to them as “Bigots.”)
I think I’d enjoy this Spirit Smoking Lounge, except for the detail of still being embodied and also not smoking.
September 4th, 2007 at 3:42 pm EST -
Chris says:
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The Ghost of Violet says:
Oh, man. Chinglish heaven!
I like the almost epic quality of this one:
make sure not to shoot to human body, and the shoots head cannot refit sharp, or sharpen thing to stab face human body, and combine to need under the adult serve as guardian usage.
While the pithy “invite the adult” in this line is, to my mind, evocatively poignant:
cannot contact this toy with fire, and invite the adult.
And then there’s the eminently sensible:
when the flying saucer doesn’t stop, please don’t touch it.
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simply wondered says:
“And then there’s the eminently sensible:
when the flying saucer doesn’t stop, please don’t touch it.”
now if mr korersh had only read this, a lot of problems as adult loony robed guardian been averted to face and other human body
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The Ghost of Violet says:
I’m so tempted to come up with an illustration for this post. Picture it: a fast Ether Lord, surrounded by his fucking net, ascending into the heavens…
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Flash says:
Was there a diagram?
While travelling in China, my son came across a sign next to a deep gorge with the translation ‘Take care! Fall into water carefully!’
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a louis wain cat says:
“Fuck” turns up pretty often in bad Chinese-to-English translations. It was a long time ago that I heard this and I might have some details wrong, but I’ve heard that it was more or less officially adopted in the seventies as the translation of choice for a very common and not at all profane Mandarin word due to a combination of imperfect understanding of English on the part of the high-level government officials in charge of these things and Maoist ideology. The ideological part came in due to an idea that translations to English should reflect “proletarian” English, and they were under the impression that “fuck” was a good example of such. I don’t quite remember what the Chinese word that gets translated as “fuck” means, but I think it’s something like “doing”, “fixing”, or “action.”
This kind of thing goes in the opposite direction as well. Native speakers of Chinese/Japanese often find much hilarity in Western usage of Chinese/Japanese characters as decoration- the website http://www.hanzismatter.com is a compilation of examples of such, featuring things like a men’s bathing suit from Walmart with some Japanese characters on it that inexplicably say “pocket-sized book”.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
Victor Mair wrote about the ubiquitious mistranslation of the Chinese GAN as “fuck” here: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Em.....03205.html
I’ve read more about this somewhere, similar to what you’ve read, though I don’t recall a reference to Maoist ideology; it was more about wanting to be hip. The original mistranslation apparently came about because GAN with one tone means “do,” and in colloquial English this was translated as “fuck.” But GAN with various tones/contexts means different things, like “dry,” but now they’re all getting translated as “fuck.”
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The Ghost of Violet says:
I dearly love mistranslations. Here are some oldies but goodies.
The boots of ascension are a sentimental favorite, but this one is pure joy:
From a brochure of a car rental firm in Tokyo: When passenger of foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage then tootle him with vigor.
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B. Dagger Lee says:
Who gave you the top secret instructions to my Dual-Purpose Textual-Analysis and Sausage-Making Machine? Goddamn it, now the terrorists will win.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
BDL, I’m going to start calling you Ether Lord.
