I can’t speak, read or write Welsh, so I haven’t got the slightest idea what gyfieithu means. Neither did Swansea council when they put up this bilingual road sign:
From the BBC:
When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.
Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated”.
So that was what went up under the English version which barred lorries from a road near a supermarket.
“When they’re proofing signs, they should really use someone who speaks Welsh,” said journalist Dylan Iorwerth.
Beyond Chinglish? My favorite machine translation:
I don’t know where in China this restaurant is or who took the picture. I saw it here.
Back in the late 1980s, someone said to me: “You’re all wasting your time learning these foreign languages. Pretty soon computers are going be translating everything and there’ll be nothing for you to do.” One day, perhaps. But not just yet.
Update: I have now discovered that Translate server error was photographed in June by Samuel Osouf on the road between Beijing and Taiyuan. He posted it on Facebook, from whence it spread quickly around the world. Perhaps the first blogger to copy it (giving credit to the photographer) was Liuzhou Laowai.
4 Comments
Interesting. I guess the owner of this restaurant doesn’t know English, so he/she entered the word of restaurant in Chinese into any translation soft which then confronted a error and gave the prompt, but the owner thought it was the very translation of restaurant.
Interesting indeed. This “TRANSLATE server error” is beyond translation error, I guess.
Nice to see the Welsh example highlighted. Ok, this kind of thing is far more prevalent in China, but considering that much of the UK doesn’t bother to translate any signs, I can’t say that I’m entitled to get on my high horse on the subject. It isn’t as though I speak a single word of Mandarin.
As far as Chinglish is concerned in general, I love it. It shows that someone is trying and sometimes, it’s head and shoulders above a traditional translation. This for example:
“Tender, fragrant grass. How hard-hearted to trample.”
So much better than “Keep off the grass.”
Don’t get me wrong, a professional translation agency should be used whenever the translation is of vital importance but otherwise, I’d prefer to see Chinglish left alone.
This is one of the funniest posts I have seen about translation mishaps. These images prove, once more, that machine translation cannot replace any human translator. Serious translation work should be sent to professional translators or translation agencies.
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