Journalist, Ben Macintyre of The Times gets lost in mistranslation in China

Created: 31/07/2008

This excellent article written by Ben Macintyre was published in The Times, January 16 2008. We at Andiamo! hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

I RECENTLY VISITED THE GREAT WALL of China and found myself lost in awe. I was overpowered with admiration, stunned by the sheer ingenuity of the mistranslated noticeboard at its foot. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to render the rules into English; each word had been analysed with extraordinary care - and each was very slightly wrong. It began: “Please don't carve arbitrarily on the Great Wall. Protect one brick and one stone conscientiously.” Then the signwriter offered a couple of suggestions: “In order to keep fit no spitting” and “Please pay attention to your safety in the rain and snow weather.” Before this rousing coda: “Please walk carefully on abrupt slope and dangerous way: Don't run and pushes to pash violently and the laugh and frolic.”

Mistranslated English is one of the great pleasures of travelling abroad. It is, I suppose, one of the privileges of a lingua franca that English-speakers have more opportunities than anyone else to see their tongue twisted. I am sure that our efforts to translate for the benefit of visitors are just as inadvertently amusing.

Mistranslations often seem to have a sort of internal poetry, conveying far more meaning than an accurate version, and sometimes offer a small glimpse into the mind of the translator. I can't help feeling that the warning not to “pash violently and the laugh and frolic” was written by some curmudgeonly old communist convinced that Westerners do nothing but pash violently and frolic all day.

A little farther along the wall I was introduced to some of the local fauna: “Black bear, eating meat catalog, bear branch.” Then the warning: “Bear is a direct bowel animal so if eat sundry good easy to cause bowel block, especially plastic bag and bottle of mineral water can cause death.” I found that rather moving.

Mistranslated menus offers particularly rich fare, from the “fried nun” found on many an Indian menu and“hambuggers” the world over, to more elaborate preparations such as the “three cute prawns suntanning on the rice”. As Charlie Croker points out in Still Lost in Translation, his second collection of “Misadventures in English Abroad”, there is such competition between restaurants, and such a hunger for the supposed sophistication that English affords, that linguistic over-egging is practically standard. “Fragrant bone in garlic in strange flavour” is, of course, a precise description, if hardly enticing.

But English can be just too specific, such as with the Chinese offering of “Dumpling stuffed with the ovary and digestive glands of a crab”. It only takes one word to go awry for the product to take on a very different complexion, such as the Japanese advert that wonders: “Why does coffee taste so good when you're naked with your family?” On the other hand, “Believed ham of the country” sounds so much more delicious than the merely “authentic” or “traditional” stuff.

I vividly remember a tailor's shop sign in India that boldly declared: “Our best is none too good”, and a French wine list promising: “Our wines leave you nothing to hope for.” Then there is the Cypriot restaurant that recommends of its speciality dish: “Try it, and try to forget it.”

As Croker points out, mistranslations can be divided into two categories. In some, one can glimpse what the translator is driving at, however dimly: the “Beach of irregular bottoms” sign in Spain, for example, or “Beware of your luggage”, and the sign outside a cathedral in Cancún, Mexico, that says: “Please keep loud, wild babes out of the sanctuary.” (I have been to Cancún, and the place for loud, wild babes is in the beachfront bars.) I particularly like the sign at Jeddah airport: “You are required to declare all sorts of private things”.

Then there is the variety that simply makes no sense at all, no matter how hard one squints. Take this on an inflatable slide in Jeddah: “Thereto each participant taken circumspection and the carefulness the aquitable”.

The best mistranslations aspire to a degree of philosophical grandeur that would be impossible in both the language of the translator and “correct” English. Take, for example, the creator of the Indian Highway Code, who reaches for a truth more important than mere law-abiding motoring when he (for it is surely a he) writes: “We should not drive in the drinking mood and with the worries of the mind. At the time of driving, we should not accompany by ladies. If we do it so, it will create accident.”

But before we get too smug about distorted English, it is worth remembering that native English-speakers are just as capable as falling into the elephant traps of the language as anyone else. For just one example, recall the famous sign in a small Cornish hotel: “Will any guest wishing to take a bath please make arrangements to have one with Mrs Harvey.”

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