Google translate strikes again, bothers Chinese
I recently had a ton of dental work done so to heal I’ve been sitting in bed catching up on tv shows.
I was watching an episode of Fringe, the JJ Abrams show that early on was likened to the X-Files. Anyway, in a particular episode in the third season, a character is kidnapped and held in a secret lab in Chinatown. She escapes, runs through the neighbourhood looking for help, and whatever. As I was watching, I was thinking, “wow, they didn’t fuck up so much with the Chinese on this one”. I just assumed it was because they filmed it in a real Chinatown and were therefore not responsible for any accuracies or inaccuracies.
Then I saw this: 
The sign reads 新年快乐的兔子 xīnnián kuàilè de tùzi. It’s supposed to read “Happy year of the rabbit” but it does not. I jumped on to Google Translate, and sure enough “Happy year of the rabbit” kicks out “新年快乐的兔子”. I did a quick search for the phrase, which returned a number of posts on Chinese language BBS boards. Fringe is pretty popular in Asia, and the posters on the board were not amused.
Comments were mostly along the lines of “what the hell is that supposed to mean?” or “Why the heck didn’t they just ask a Chinese person?” or, somewhat more helpfully, “It’s just from Google Translate and foreigners can’t understand Chinese characters anyway so whatever.”
But my favourite was a quote from a Baidu post that read
这叫美式中文。。。
和中式英语一样。。。
都是直翻。。。。。。This is called American style Chinese…
It’s the same as Chinese style English…
Both are just straight translations…
I enjoy it for the fact that the poster made reference to the millions of obviously terribly translations or nonsense phrases being worn on the t-shirts of the Chinese youth. How many times have we seen an absurd menu and thought to ourselves “Why didn’t they just ask a foreigner…”?
I’m not really sure why they felt the need to add that sign anyway, and if they did need to add something to the door, couldn’t they have just bought a 双喜 sign at the neighbourhood 小卖部?
The next episode also had some Chinese showing up, this time on a chalk board in a lab full of people who don’t read or speak Chinese. Here’s a shot:
Apparently hanzi is better to make the audience understand the scientists genius better than nonsense mathematics like the traditionalists use.
直翻 tends to be translated as “literal translation.” Of course, like in English’s “literal translation”, Mandarin’s 直翻 usually implies a badly done machine translation.
And who writes 直翻 anyway? It’s 直譯 in these parts, at least among 內行。
Well, that guy writes 直翻, for one. Guess you’d need to take it up with him.
Maybe the nonsense hanzi in the classroom is justifiable…
Back in my math days when I was struggling through a class that played with partial differential equations in the context of relativity theory, a class that had a lot of variables and subscripting, the professor started using cyrillic letters because “I keep running out of Roman letters”.
Just imagine what he could have done if he’d had hanzi.
I’d agree with you if not for the temporal proximity to other of hanzi in the series. That, and the fact that two big characters to label a part of the brain doesn’t make much sense any way you put it.
Well, it makes me feel like we are “even” – as an American who just spent a year in China and the English language is butchered EVERYWHERE. Even an “in case of fire” sign in a mall labeling the “exigency button”!!! Which is really close, but not exactly. haha
Interesting post, I often wonder the same question… why don’t they simply ask a native speaker? Although perhaps it would be nice to note what some of the common expression for the year of the rabbit really are. Something like 兔年吉祥 (tù nián jí xiáng) or anything found by researching 兔年吉祥話 , this way we can hopefully influence others who will only rely on Google to make decisions for TV show signage, tattoos or just random characters that they want to learn out of curiosity.
I would say they have a right to be amused/annoyed by the terrible translation. Yes, there are a million “Chinglish” T-shirts out there, but foreigners get so worked up (either in frustration or amusement) by these badly translated signs/menus/T-shirts. To flip the paradigm again, there are so many Americans who have idiotic tattoos of Chinese characters that in some cases mean nothing. I heard a story of a guy who got “his kids’ initials” tattood on his shoulder “in Chinese”. Like, somebody told him “Yeah, this is how you write “R.B.S” in Chinese. And Westerners spend so much time flabbergasted about bad menus.
wshoey: basically my point. at any rate I doubt there’s much overlab between the people who get bent out of shape over menus and those who appreciate the flip side of Westerners screwing up in the same way.
anyway my point was to show that it very much goes both ways.
I don’t get the problem. The sign shows a picture of a rabbit. The Chinese says that this is the ‘Happy New Year’ rabbit. Am I missing something?
Bathrobe,
the sentence construction for the Chonese is off.
I was, of course, speaking tongue-in-cheek. The sentence construction is ok if you see it as a description of the rabbit, but not as a translation of ‘Happy Year of the Rabbit’.