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Lordandmaster -> RE: Badly translated signs in English (6/28/2007 9:07:11 AM)
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That's basically right, but it's more complicated (and interesting) than that. The culprit is the simplified writing system. In the traditional writing system, gan meaning "dry" and gan meaning "to do" are clearly differentiated: 乾 vs. 干. They're pronounced with different tones, too: gan1 vs. gan4. But both are, very stupidly, represented by a single simplified character: 干. Now one slang meaning of gan4, which means "to do" is, not too surprisingly, "to fuck." Somewhere along the line someone must have looked up gan1 干, meaning "dry," in a PRC dictionary and found "to fuck" listed under the meanings for the OTHER gan. How on earth this mistake got to be so common, I have no idea. But if you Google "Chinglish fuck" and then click Images, you'll get a ton of examples.
Edited to add: Oh, you might have to make sure that your Google content filter is turned off.
quote:
ORIGINAL: Shanghaid
As an example, something that I've seen quite a few times is a menu item that typically reads 'Fuck the Pork', 'Fuck the Beef' or (less frequently) 'Fuck the Chicken'.
When I first got here, I thought it was a cruel joke played by an English speaker on a hapless restauranteur. Only after my Chinese began to improve did I realize it was another translation for 'dried'. As in 'Dried Beef' etc...
Apparently, in most Chinese-English dictionaries, they neglect to attach warnings to some translations.
Quite the eye-opener.
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