Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Angel Of Death]

Spoiler: New favorite Chinglish. (possibly NSFW) (click to show/hide)

I am now in pain from laughter. Even though it could be fake, I'm still going to laugh.

[RedKing]

Why would one word mean both "dried" and "fucks", in such a way that the "fucks" translation isn't obviously vulgar and incorrect?

And therein lies the glory of Chinglish. Because the grammar structures are so different, most cheap translation software tries to fit the words into a standard English pattern based on word order. There's no "the" in Mandarin. And there's no verb conjugation or tense. The literal translation of the characters in order would be "shrimp dry fry white vegetable". "white vegetable", baicai is the word for Chinese cabbage (in Cantonese it becomes bok choy, which is the more familiar name in the West).

So the program goes "The shrimp...hmm, got the noun, need a verb. Next character is a verb--fuck. Now we need an object. The Cabbage."

Gan has about twenty different meanings, one of which is "to do". Which has been appropriated into vernacular Chinese (as in English) as a euphemism for "fuck". So perhaps a slightly more accurate (though still incorrect) translation would be "The shrimp does the fried cabbage."

@Angel: It's real. For whatever reason, this particular verb substitution is rampant in Chinglish. My guess is that there's one or two cheap-ass translation softwares out there that use this word mapping and are probably available on pirated CDs in every street market from Shanghai to Tibet. It's pretty common for merchants (and hell...the government itself) to just run the Chinese characters through a translator, print out whatever comes out and stick that up without ever verifying accuracy. Beijing had to spend millions of dollars and a small army of volunteers to scour the streets of Beijing looking for bad and/or embarassing translations before the 2008 Olympics. Ditto Shanghai and the 2010 Expo.

[ein]

Why would one word mean both "dried" and "fucks", in such a way that the "fucks" translation isn't obviously vulgar and incorrect?

The Japanese word for penis literally translates as rare halberd.

[Aqizzar]

Gan has about twenty different meanings, one of which is "to do". Which has been appropriated into vernacular Chinese (as in English) as a euphemism for "fuck". So perhaps a slightly more accurate (though still incorrect) translation would be "The shrimp does the fried cabbage."

Ah, okay, makes perfect sense.  Variations of "do" and "is" and other general action verbs across languages seems to be the most common source of such confusion.  Spanish is full of them too, which isn't helped by English and Spanish and the rest of Europe directly loaning words to each other and then making up new contextual definitions.  You'd think stuff like "to do" would be pretty universal.

[RedKing]

One of the root problems with Chinese is that there's a maximum of 413 phonemes (without tones) and about 1600 with tones. So you have to squeeze the entirety of a spoken language out of roughly 1600 possible words. Not sounds, words.  Which means a lot of reusing the same spoken word for numerous things. And complicates the hell of trying to agglutinate words like German. When the Germans need to "build" a new word, they can just make one really long word that tells you exactly what the new word means. If you do that in Chinese, you just increase the number of possible meanings that the word could have.

It's a wonderful, beautiful, abso-motherfuckin'-lutely insane language.

[Jopax]

So i started watching Game of Thrones, a really great show, i don't remember the last time (Firefly) it took a show only two episodes to get me this involved and stir so many different emotions, from cheering to pure hate, i just hope they keep up the great work

[Burnt Pies]

Almost crying with laughter after reading through the Metal Gear thread in Other Games and reading the comic Darvi posted about using a Cigar to cure wounds. It's just brilliant.

[ToonyMan]

I saw Kung Fu Panda 2 like right after waking up today.  It was very good, the art design and flow was amazing.

[Heliman]

I've decided to play touhou. all of them, from the beginning.
God have mercy on my soul.

[SHAD0Wdump]

Turned out we got to play gurps after all, yesturday turned out bad for it.

[chaoticag]

Ran another session of gurps. Bread nightmares and bread gags. And underwear, bound cultists, and intrigue. It's been kinda fun.

[Gunner-Chan]

Game was fun, Idiots were banned and cookies wine and rootbeer were consumed.

Good day so far :3

[RedKing]

Ran another session of gurps. Bread nightmares and bread gags. And underwear, bound cultists, and intrigue. It's been kinda fun.

Heh...reminds me of an old Ars Magica game I was in where one of the characters took the disadvantage that all his spells needed a focus in order to cast (wands, gems, rare ingredients, etc.)

His focus category? Cheese. We laughed until he came up with the Ignem Fulgens d'Limburg.

[Karnewarrior]

Ran another session of gurps. Bread nightmares and bread gags. And underwear, bound cultists, and intrigue. It's been kinda fun.

Heh...reminds me of an old Ars Magica game I was in where one of the characters took the disadvantage that all his spells needed a focus in order to cast (wands, gems, rare ingredients, etc.)

His focus category? Cheese. We laughed until he came up with the Ignem Fulgens d'Limburg.

He lit the cheese on fire and threw it at the enemy?


I got Fallout 3 today! Hooray!

[breadbocks]

Ran another session of gurps. Bread nightmares and bread gags. And underwear, bound cultists, and intrigue. It's been kinda fun.

Whaaaaaaaaaat.