Posts Tagged ‘chinese’
Stir-Fried Wikipedia
When one online machine translation tool apparently mistranslated a common Chinese word as “Wikipedia,” Chinese menus began popping up everywhere with English translations for menu items like “stir-fried Wikipedia" and “barbecued Congo eel with Wikipedia and fermented bean curd.” Read more machine translation blunders in the article [...]
Cheap Translation Kills
Not all mistranslations mean the difference between life and death, but some do. Some cheap translations can actually kill. See the following examples from the article, "'Airline pulp' and bad translations that can crash a plane," by Globalization Group vice president Adam Wooten. ...a 2008 helicopter crash in France... was suspected to be the [...]
Google Translate has great uses, disastrous misuses
Google Translate and other free online translation tools can be great for instant, informal translation. When expectations are properly set, particularly for low-value text, unedited machine translation can be quite useful. However, when a user overestimates machine translation capabilities, the results can be confusing at best. When one online [...]
Mistranslation as a Virtue?
Mistranslation can cause physical or financial harm, as illustrated by many anecdotes on this blog. However, we must admit that mistranslation will - in extremely rare instances - be perceived as a virtue by some. For example, some U.S. restaurant patrons like to see poorly translated menus in ethnic restaurants because they then assume the [...]
Preventing Mistranslation is Easier than Retracting Translation Blunders
Benjamin Franklin said, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." This is true in translation. As illustrated when a magazine ironically added Google mistranslations to an article about translation quality in bold, red print, it is easier to prevent mistranslations than it is to retract mistranslations and fully recover from [...]
Airline Pulp
"Southern China Airways once distributed a snack package with the mysterious-sounding label 'Airline Pulp' and no other description. Yum – sounds tasty! This mistranslated label will probably not get the airline nominated for any airline food awards..." Read more airline-related translation bloopers in the article "'Airline pulp' and bad [...]
‘Airline pulp’ and bad translations that can crash a plane
Southern China Airways once distributed a snack package with the mysterious-sounding label “Airline Pulp” and no other description. Yum – sounds tasty! This mistranslated label will probably not get the airline nominated for any airline food awards, but it could be worse. Some in-flight mistranslations will make you laugh, but others will [...]
Basketball Bloopers Lost in Translation
Products and apparel for basketball fans have been the victims of broken English translations. This is not the only sport to see translation blunders - baseball, soccer, and just about every other sport have seen similarly humorous mistranslations - but here are a few from the world of basketball. One UNLV Runnin' Rebels T-shirt (obviously [...]
Do Not Assume Everyone Understands Basic Principles of Translation
"...just because someone in a company understands how to avoid the risks of producing bad translation does not mean everyone in a company does. Someone else — someone whose job description is not even supposed to include translation — may not know it is inappropriate to run your marketing collateral through a free online translator. Even the [...]
Irony: Magazine Mistakenly Adds Google Mistranslation to Article about Translation
A regional business magazine added a creative design element to an article I wrote about translation. Ironically, that design included a translation error generated by a machine translation program, and the article, titled “Lost in Translation,” became self-descriptive... Read the rest at "Irony: Magazine mistakenly adds Google mistranslation [...]
