"Please urinate with precision and elegance" is pretty good though, if I ran a bar I'd be tempted to hang that over the urinals. Gets a laugh, and gets the point across.
I remember seeing years ago an interview with a Japanese clothing designer. When the interviewer said the text on his shirt didn't make sense, he replied "I know, but it looks cool and it sounds cool."
Yeah. besides something aimed at visitors from say a train operator that is translated so badly its give the wrong information, these are not a problem. English words are used by Japanese speakers on Japan to express something to other Japanese speakers, and even if it doesnt follow rules a native speaker of english would expect, thats not a problem, because they're not the audience.
Pointing out that Duolingo has taken an old website and turned its content into a marketing gimmick/"museum" before it's even had time to grow cold isn't really "self-centered snobbery," "bringing misery onto others" because "the world… revolve[s] around you." I can't help but feel like your response evinces a worse attitude than the one you're responding to.
The first picture literally translate to "Please use the bathroom cleanly", where the translator pulled the word "urinate" from is anyones guess.
In the second picture, I believe that if you hanged "ha" to "ga" in Japanese, the translation would be correct. "ha/ga" are notoriously difficult for learners of Japanese (so it is with great fear I point towards differences in their meaning), but I wonder what mix-up caused the weird translation, since I doubt the translator had trouble understanding the Japanese text ....
To the Japanese, languages such as English are legalistic and rudely direct and specific. Japanese tends to be ambiguous and the Japanese tend to not directly say what they mean, since that would be rude and exclude the listener. Translating Japanese to English usually requires creatively interpreting the meaning of the kanji characters and the intent of the writer. Teasing out the meaning of some complicated kanji can be difficult, so it seems pretty common to just make something up that sounds reasonable. I've worked on translations that were over 60% completely made up.
I agree that "please urinate with precision and elegance" is more direct than "please use the bathroom cleanly," but it's kind of funny that the translators assumed English speakers would expect the very direct version.
は(wa) is a case marker which makes something the topic of the sentence. Topic isn't strictly analogous to subject in English.
The verb is "not eat". If the topic was "children", then the topic would be the subject when translated ('Children は not eat' -> "Children [must] not eat"). But if the topic was, say, "candy", it would instead map onto object in English ('Candy は not eat' -> "[Someone must] not eat candy").
Perhaps the translator was not aware that this flexibility does not exist in English.
Learning about は (wa) was my rabbit hole into Japanese particles and how there is not a super clear analogue in English. Apparently, sometimes western learners of Japanese think it’s some form of the verb “to be” which we use everywhere in American English (in British English, they tend to use more of “to have” than we do, which is kind of a running theme among western and southern European languages as well).
This is an interesting case where systems like Google translate break down because there is no clear meaning without context.
However when you learn about も (mo), another Japanese particle, it used very similarly to the word “too” or “also” in English, e.g. I (watashi) am also (mo) fine (genki desu).
There is also の (no) which indicates possession in the same way we use “of” or in other European languages, “de”, “di”, “von”, “van”.
Pre-pandemic, I worked for Alibaba and traveled to China multiple times. I actually greatly enjoyed the mistranslations on signs and billboards. Not in a mean 'Im-better-than-thou' way, but as a point of reflection to a lot of the weird things and phrases _I_ use that are objectively sorta strange.
Mistranslations are often eccentric and oddly eloquent in their own regard. I took as many pictures of them as I could and they're some of my favorite parts of traveling in Asia.
Here are a few classics in my collection, my favorite being the dinner menu complete with an "Explosives" section:
Side note: I discovered when I used "mistranslations" to speak to non-native speakers overseas, they actually found it far easier to understand me than if I spoke "proper" english. Some of the language concepts (conjugation, verb tense) we have in English don't seem to exist in same forms as Asian languages.
“I shall assume that you, the reader, are learning to translate into your language of habitual use, since that is the only way you can translate naturally, accurately and with maximum effectiveness. In fact, however, most translators do translate out of their own language ('service' translation) and contribute greatly to many people's hilarity in the process.” - From “A Textbook of Translation” by Peter Newmark
Ironically, this itself reads like a translation. I don't feel like most native English speakers would express this so elaborately or with so many phrases interjected with commas.
I am utmostly certain that such phrases, that mark the writing as a refined specimen, go by a proper name of their own. I write at great remove from my most recent grammar lessons, and so their name does not fall easily to hand at this time.
The author in question was born in 1916, and the book appears to be from 1988. I suppose the past truly is a foreign country, even if that past isn't that long ago.
Wow. That's maybe 100 years newer than I'dve guessed. It sounds almost Victorian in its phrasing.
Before any English folks start sharpening their torches and pitchforks, I speak the bastardized rustic version of your tongue in the USA. Apologies if I can't tell Victorian English from Elizabethan (II) English.
I stayed with a Japanese colleague for a few days once. Lovely people, and I'm very grateful they were willing to host a clueless foreigner when they already had two toddlers in the house.
The adults had both gone to college in Canada, so they had mostly great English, but every once in a while they'd say something completely insane. For example, when trying to express to me that his bathroom was carpeted and men should urinate sitting down, he wrote in an email, "Please don't be sitting in pee!"
“Everything not saved will be lost forever” - Nintendo Cartridge.
Somehow we block out poetry in our own language, but translation it can pass through as a translation.
Without context, it's still a reasonable translation. I guess the idiomatic English in that situation would be "When the coffee is gone, it's gone.", or maybe "Refills of coffee will not be provided".
I’d love to see the original setting. Was the sign intended to tell the consumer that no fresh coffee would be made, or that there are no free refills? The museum setting (in front of an empty coffee maker) implies the first, but I suspect the second was intended?
Honestly, the only mistranslation here is the extraneous full stop after the first clause. Replace it with a comma and it becomes a serviceable, if odd-sounding, English sentence that conveys the correct meaning.
I live in a predominantly Chinese area of a major US city, with many people who speak virtually no English and many stores dedicated to catering to them. Including clothing stores.
The amount of engrish I see on the shirts and jackets of people walking around is a wonder to behold.
My wife once made the mistake of wising somebody a happy asshole instead of a happy birthday.
Missing context, a hilarious YouTube video I can't find. The difference between year and asshole and potato and pope is an accent mark. Anos: asshole. Años: years.
N and ñ are entirely distinct letters with different sounds - that’s not a translation problem but a typo. As long as you’re talking about Spanish, it’s the same as confusing cajones and cagones.
Hmm, wikipedia (admittedly english wikipedia) considers it a diacritic despite the fact that it's considered it's own letter. Is there a different generic term for "typographic mark above the main body of a letter"?
The translation of the coffee one is not actually bad; it's partly weird because the original is weird. It is saying that something is over as soon as the coffee runs out (maybe some demo of the coffee or machine or something). It's hard to understand why another pot couldn't be brewed if there is continued interest.
it's pretty clear in Japanese
if hard to translate. I means "this is all the coffee
we will be providing. when it's gone there will be no more" (as in don't ask for more coffee. We made one pot and that's it)
When I lived in Tokyo in 1997 I reveived a Sony Beans Walkman as a gift from my gym for introducing a new member. The case was made of phosphorescent material and the packaging said:
I guess to keep it at pocket-size, one must always carry a flashlight to illuminate the pocket. Otherwise, I'd imagine the Walkman would transform into a full blown cassette deck! Wonder of Japanese technology.
