Lost in Translation

In the past 6 weeks my friends and I have discovered a new past time: finding the craziest 翻译 (fanyi), which means "translations." I'm sure if you're a Spanish speaker, you see some pretty funny translations in the States. However, because Chinese and English are so far apart linguistically, you often get some pretty laughable translations.

There's an obvious divide on where the best translations are: you're private companies, especially foreign ones such as Wal-Mart and Carrefour are going to have the best translations--they're paying translators a good sum of money not to screw it up, and it's in their best interest to look like a competent company. Your little local Chinese restaurants are okay, although you don't see much translations there in the first place. They often get some translations wrong, but many Chinese have command of the English language, so it's not a problem for them. The worst is certainly your public parks and attractions. There's really nothing hinging on whether or not they get these translations right or not--people are still going to come to their parks for their beauty, or in my case, the hilarious translations.

So below throughout this post there are some signs and other funny stuff either I or my friends have seen, some more laughable the others.

In the 2nd picture of the rock, if you look to the left of it you can see the "firm" rock in the background. They weren't joking around, that thing wasn't going anywhere.

On the picture of the red material, you're guess is as good as mine--I'm still trying to figure it out.

The picture of the disco club with the Indian prominently mounted on the entrance--we didn't actually go in--is pretty interesting. My classmate Robbie, when he first saw it, aptly put it, "A disco with Cowboys, Indians, and neon lights--it looks like someone watched way too many American movies and mashed them all together."

I think my favorite has to be the last picture. It's on the same type of sign as the first one and a few others--these were all found at Sun Island the first weekend here. Of course, Sun Island is a a big attraction here in Harbin, and of course it's government owned and run.

Other than wasting my time looking for ridiculous translations, I have been studying, even if my blogs don't exactly portray it. This last was pretty cool because things are finally starting to click. I'm actually retaining vocab and grammar, and I can watch a Chinese TV program or read simple newspaper articles with minimal difficulty. I've also switched several websites over to Chinese language, and also portions of my computer's operating system. It's kind of slow at first working with all that Chinese, and kind of scary when a pop up box comes up in Chinese and you're not sure whether you're deleting important things (or course, you kind of have to consult the dictionary). But all this helps, and now I don't even think twice about speaking Chinese. Kind of a shame I have to go back in two weeks.

This weekend we go bowling, so I'm gonna put some people to shame. I'll let you know how the slaughtering goes.