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Translation
Malformed English in Guiyang delights online commentersPosted by Joel Martinsen on Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 12:29 PM
![]() The sun's expensive in Guiyang This entertaining sign was posted by the Guiyang Passenger Railway Branch and was recently discovered by the Chengdu Business News. Although the English translation of the first line, "The expensive sun multiplies by a duty a police to pay a brigade," is completely incomprehensible, there's no mystery as to how it occurred: it's basically a character-by-character translation of 贵阳乘警支队:
What it should be: Guiyang (贵阳) Rail Police (乘警) Detachment (支队). Whoever reviewed the translation didn't even notice that it should have contained the name of the city. The second line is more confusing. It's actually a hotline for reporting police behavior (警风) and road conditions (路风), where , "breeze," also carries the meaning "style" or "behavior" (as in the jargon term 党风, "working style of the party"). So that explains the first three words of the translation. But the next few words make no sense at all. How did "the hurl" and "tell" come out of , "to supervise"? Even when broken into individual characters, the meaning's just not there. Fortunately, the final word, , "telephone," is rendered correctly. Chengdu Business News spoke to an expert who said that even a middle school student wouldn't have come up with such an absurd translation. He speculated that the translator must have used the most primitive version of Chinese-English translation software available. Commenters posting on Netease had a field day with the article. The current top comment offers other creative translations for Chinese cities (there are many more here:
The Guiyang Rail Passenger Branch, which falls under the authority of the Chengdu Railway Bureau, has promised to fix the sign as soon as possible. Links and Sources
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Comments on Malformed English in Guiyang delights online commenters
watch out, in IE6, this post has a formatting error that gives subsequent posts a dotted underline.
推荐金老师看看这篇文章,关于中国学术期刊用fu*k的博客分析。link
Thanks, Inst. It's fixed now.
I'm not even Chinese, and I can tell that
"四川——Four Mountains" is incorrect.
The translation should be "4 rivers"?
@steve
Yes, you are right.
川, as its glyph shows, is flowing water (cough, not from water faucet).
Would the author of the article like to correct his own spelling of "occurred"?
[Maybe. --JM]
And 兰州 means "orchid state". 兰 appears to have been confused with the homophonous 蓝 "blue".
兰 can be used in place of 蓝 when refering to "blue color". This is a widely accepted misuse.
Orchid, in English, can be also used as color, light purple.
hurl + tell = 投訴
They should learn to use google language tools. It gives pretty accurate translation from chinese to english now.
I'm surprised nobody has posted a creative translation of Anhui's provincial capital (Hefei).
Hefei (合肥) is translated further down in the Netease thread as "two fat."
"Two fat" is derived from a cross talk about place names, hehe.