Uncategorized
If you have a restaurant and want to translate that word into English for your sign, but you don’t want to spend money on it, what do you do? You just use free translation software! That’s what the owner of this restaurant likely did. However, he probably did not speak a single word of English, because when the software gave an error message he used that as the translation on his sign…
Thanks to Shanghaiist, that got the picture from Fools Mountain. Whoever took the picture originally: thanks for sharing!
I am a Dutch entrepreneur in Shanghai who has lived and worked over 12 years in China. Co-founder of among others Tudou.com and unitedstyles.com, advisor to Spil Games for which I set up and led the Asian operation (2006-2011), and angel investor in Chinese Internet and tech start-ups. Married to Grace, with whom I have a son (Scott) and a daughter (Elaine). These are my personal views and do not necessarily represent the companies I am involved with. You can reach me at marcvanderchijs (at) gmail (dot) com
2 Responses to “Translate Server Error”
quite interesting. lol. u guy can share this at engrishfunny.com
I don’t doubt he’s benefited from the mistake though. He must have got loads of free publicity from this.
That said, I’d imagine the sign would have been taken down by now. I hope not but they seem to be waging war on this kind of thing. In a way, I can understand it and in some cases, they definitely need to bring in a translation company. You can’t have this kind of thing cropping up in important documents and I understand wanting to protect your own language from being tainted or ridiculed. But in the case of the latter, not all examples of Chinglish are an affront to the language, at least not from my perspective. Take this:
“Tender, fragrant grass. How hard-hearted to trample”.
Personally, I think that’s head and shoulders above a traditional translation.