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Language Log: The Etiology and Elaborati

Language Log
Due to <NounPhrase> and that <Sentence> | Main | Antedating hyphenation

Decem ber 09, 2007 THE ETIOLOGY AND ELABORATION OF A FLAGRANT MISTRANSLATION [Guest post by V ictor Mair] A series of earlier Language Log posts hav e discussed the curious phenomenon seen in the grocery -store sign on the right: absurdly crude English mistranslations in bizarrely inappropriate contex ts. In "Gan: whodunnit, and how, and why ?" (5/31 /2006), I ex plained one of the sources of this phenomenon: sev eral Chinese characters pronounced GA N1 or GAN4 -- and meaning such widely disparate things as "dry ," "calendrical sign," "to do," and much else beside -- all got collapsed into one simplified character: . This has led to enormous confusion, especially when people who know nex t to no English rely on machine translation software to conv ert Chinese into English. The chaos caused by this combination of circumstances is v astly ex acerbated by the fact that this little, three-stroke sy mbol also has a v ulgar meaning when pronounced in the fourth tone, GA N4, namely "fuck," which is probably an ex tension of the regular sense of "do." Because GA N4 ("do") and GAN1 ("dry ") are now both written with that little, three-stroke character, the damage is compounded by the enormous range of intended senses of GA N1 /4 ("dry ," "do," "act," "work," "undertake," "shield," "hav e to do with; be concerned with," "edge of a body of water," "be rude, impolite, blunt," "embarrass or annoy ," "giv e the cold-shoulder to," "empty , hollow," measure word for a group of people, "trunk, stem, main part," "cadre," "competent, capable, able, talented," "go bad," "be a disaster," etc.), all of which are capable of coming out of the translation software as "fuck." People who see signs employ ing the f-word all ov er China, ev en in large stores and fancy restaurants, are not only aghast, they wonder how the dickens such a gross mistranslation could hav e originated and proliferated. I believ e that the ex planation giv en in the prev ious paragraph adequately and accurately accounts for the origin of the basic GA N1 /4 = "fuck" mistranslation. The question that remains, then, is how did this v irus spread? Theories abound, to say the least. I hav e intelligent colleagues who believ e that naughty people do this on purpose just to scandalize customers and clients. Others hold that it is done to make English look like an uncouth language. Still others maintain that dev ious foreign translators plant these mistranslations all ov er the place to make Chinese look stupid and crude. And there are so many additional theories that attempt to account for the GA N1 /4 = "fuck" misrendering that I can't keep track of them. Most of us, howev er, hav e all along suspected that this phenomenon resulted from reliance on faulty translation software. Indeed, it is easy to prov e that absurd English translations are being spewed out daily in China when indiv iduals who don't know English merely plug Chinese sentences into the software and ex pect it to come up with reasonable renditions. For ex ample, one of my students has told me about a sign in Tai'an, in Shandong prov ince, near Qufu,
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the legendary birthplace of Confucius. The Chinese tex t reads "Liang2shi4 zheng3gu3 tui1 na2", which means "Liang Family Bone-Setting (Medical) Massage". (For a description of TUI1 NA2 in traditional Chinese medicine, see the Wikipedia entry .) The English tex t on the sign reads "Whole Bone of the Beam Surname Pushes to Take"! A fter try ing for more than a y ear to find proof that the GA N1 /4 = "fuck" mistranslation was indeed the result of rely ing on poor translation software, I am now able to demonstrate that this really does seem to be the case. Here is the ev idence. There is a bulletin board called Lequ Y uan (which means something like "Pleasure Garden"), and on that site there is a page called "L y ou Wenhua Tan" (which punningly means both "Donkey Friends Forum" and "Trav el Friends Forum"). On January 1 4, 2003 at 00:51 :23, somebody calling him/herself "kailash" made a post entitled "Gaox iao fany i (Ridiculous Translations)." The contents of kailash's post (in the top left) are the following, in my English translation: Truly ridiculous! Location of photograph(s): The new X supermarket at Hex i in Changsha (Hunan). The one that is most classic is that for GA N1 HUO4 [= "dry goods" -- it must have actually been "fuck foods" in the photograph, w hich is no longer accessible on the pku.edu.cn w eb site]. Can GA N1 really be translated that way ? Below are some (translated) comments on that post, with the commenter's name after each one: "I suspect that somebody 's been play ing tricks." Balang "Y ou go buy a Jinshan Ciba with Added Jinshan Kuaiy i." Huay uan ("Flower Garden") "Really !" kailash "I still don't believ e it." windy "Ha, ha, ha!" Knight y v an "Is it true or fake? Somehow I suspect that it has been faked." By No Means a Lonely Ostrich Huay uan followed up with another post later that same day , at 1 1 :05:21 to be precise. His response to the doubters, begins thus: NI QU MA I GE JINSHAN CIBA JIA JINSHA N KUAIY I ("Y ou go buy a Jinshan Ciba with Added Jinshan Kuaiy i"). Now, just what is this Jinshan Ciba that can be equipped with a Jinshan Kuaiy i? Literally rendered, these names mean "Gold Mountain Word Hegemon" and "Gold Mountain Fast Translator." Jinshan Ciba is an electronic reading aid (a sort of glorified bilingual [Chinese and English], and to a certain ex tent multilingual [since some Japanese is included], dictionary ), while Jinshan Kuaiy i is a machine translation dev ice. These tools are widely used all ov er China. Nearly all of the PRC students at the Univ ersity of Pennsy lv ania hav e brought theirs with them, although they realize that Jinshan Kuaiy i usually produces English that is laughable. Huay uan's post continues (emphasis added): Then let it (Jinshan Ciba / Kuaiy i) translate this sentence: NI3 XIA NG3 GAN4
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SHEN2ME? ("What do y ou want to do?") It will come out with: "what do y ou want to fuck?" T his is an ex perim ent that can be repeated; scientifically it is sufficiently rigorous. Now, that was in 2003. I hav e checked the latest v ersion of Jinshan Ciba / Kuaiy i, and it does not return the v ulgar mistranslation recorded by Huay uan, although it still comes out with a lot of other gibberish (see below). It would appear that somebody told the makers of Jinshan Ciba / Kuaiy i about this gross problem with their translation software and they hav e taken steps to remedy it. Howev er, the damage has already been done and the cancer continues to spread throughout the Chinese body linguistic. There still must be countless earlier v ersions of the Jinshan software out there that are being used daily . The only way to halt this ludicrous phenomenon is nev er to paint, print, or publish an English translation without first checking with someone who is fluent in the target language. That, of course, is unlikely in the foreseeable future, because there just aren't enough skilled speakers of English to go around for the huge demand that has engulfed China. I tested the latest v ersion of the Jinshan software, and here are some samples of what it now produces (screen shots taken a few day s ago):

NI3 XIA NG3 GA N4 SHEN2ME? Jinshan: "What do y ou want to do?"

NI3 XIA NG3Y A O4 GA N4 SHEN2ME? Jinshan: "What do y ou want to do?"

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NI3MEN ZHENG4ZA I4 GA N4 SHEN2ME? Jinshan: "Y ou just at stem what?" corrected translation: "What are y ou doing right now?"

NI3MEN GAN4 SHEN2ME NI? Jinshan: "What do y ou do?" corrected translation: "What are y ou doing?" or "What do y ou think y ou're doing?"

NI3MEN GANG1 CA I2 GA N4 SHEN2ME? Jinshan: "What are y ou just dry ?" corrected translation: "What were y ou doing just now?"

NI3 GA N4 SHEN2ME ZHE4ME SHUO1 ?

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Jinshan: "What do y ou do to say so?" corrected translation: "What do y ou mean by talking like this?" or "Why are y ou speaking this way ?"

GA N1 HUO4 Jinshan: "Dry goods"

GA N1 TIA O2 QU1 Jinshan: "The stem adjusts area" corrected translation: "Dry Seasonings Section." (see below for a brief discussion) Those who trav el around China know for certain that the GA N1 /4 = "fuck" abomination is not fake. It is real, and now -- though it remains thoroughly deplorable -- I think I understand how it happened. Here are just two of the countless instances of the GA N1 /4 = "fuck" paradigm that hav e spread throughout in China:

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Piny in: GA N1 TIA O2 QU1 English: "Fuck to adjust the area" Correct translation: "Dry Seasonings Section" Note: It is no wonder that machines get confused by this ex pression (see the less salacious machine translation abov e, no. 8 of the screen shots, "the stem adjusts area"), since ev ery Chinese to whom I'v e shown this sign has hesitated in their pronunciation (the second sy llable could also be read DIA O4) and in their interpretation of its meaning -- there are many different possibilities.

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Piny in: SAN3 GA N1 GUO3 English "spread to fuck the fruit" Correct translation: "Loose Dried Fruit" Note: More often GAN1 GUO3 actually refers to nuts instead of fruit. Many other ex amples of GA N mistranslated as "fuck" can be found on the internet -- sev eral hav e been featured in the earlier Language Log posts linked abov e, for ex ample this sign from a hotel buffet:

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A nd this restaurant sign:

Two more: what should be "dry foods price counter" is rendered in large letters as "FUCK THE CERTA IN PRICE OF GOODS":
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A nd what should be "dried foods" becomes "FUCK GOODS":

A s a sample of the other widespread effects of unwise reliance on dictionaries, digital or otherwise, here are some incredibly fine ex amples of Chinglish in Shanghai., probably also caused by ex cessiv e reliance on poor-quality machine translation. A mong other precious items, notice the "Bang products" and the "antithetical couplet ocean." Well, enough for now. I hope that I do not hav e to spend the rest of my life documenting and ex plaining Chinglish. For the moment, howev er, it would appear that I still hav e much work to do.

I wish to ex press my gratitude to Jonathan Smith for helping me track down early occurrences of the GA N1 /4="f*ck" atrocity on the Web and for the fabulous TUINA sign in Shandong, and to Jiajia Wang for making the screen shots of Jinshan Ciba / Kuaiy i in action, also for scouring Facebook for interesting ex amples of Chinglish.

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[A bov e is a guest post by V ictor Mair] [Update -- Joel Martinsen writes: I dug up a CD of Kingsoft 2002 and tested it on some of Prof. Mair's ex ample sentences. Thought it might be nice to hav e a screenshot of how the software used to work to compare to the more acceptable translations of recent v ersions of Kingsoft QuickTrans:

The last line of the attached image is part of the translation of the title of an academic paper that was published in the Economic A dministrativ e Cadre Bulletin in 2003, and discussed here in the EastSouthWestNorth blog: * [01 9] A Solid Fuck (1 2/08/2007 ) (KDnet) In issue 2, v olume 1 6, June 2003 of the Kansu prov ince Economic Administrativ e Cadre A cademy Bulletin, there appeared an essay titled < >. The author Song Chaosu is the Kansu prov incial party secretary and the chairman of the Kansu prov incial people's congress standing committee.
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In the database, the title of the article was translated into English as: Ex pand Enterprising and Really Grasp Solid Fuck and Continuously Ex pand and Great the New Situation of Buildings of Western Region. If there is a "solid fuck," it is the translation job. A more appropriate translation is: Dev elop and Forge Ahead with True Understanding and Effort in order to Continuously Create New Situations to Open Up the Western Region." ]
P oste d by Ma rk Libe rm a n a t De ce m ber 9, 2007 06:59 AM

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