Interesting thread here... I'm sure that we have all encountered at least one manual "translated" from [insert Asian language here] and chuckled at the mangled translation.
This guy hit the jackpot

http://www.vinylengine.com/turntable_fo ... 36&t=46993

http://www.damnlol.com/awesome-japanese ... 18891.html

Oh, and if you have time on your hands and have already gone through all the "people of WalMart" photos, then look at this one: www.engrish.com

Enjoy...

The "accident porn area" gets my vote

Did I arready terr you my Seiko Pocket Transrator's entries for the forrowing citrus?

Lemon: Remon
Lime: Raimu
Grapefruit: Gurapeefurutsu.

I am not making that up.

At Dell we had vendor reps from the respective countries of origin. If you think Janglesh is hard to understand, try Koranglesh.

Alan, please close. This is offensive to many.

We're not making this up, only reiterating it. That is offensive?

Macododonados....................MacDonald s
Gogeeda........Godzilla
Dan

Actually, Godzilla is an English bastardization of the original Japanese, Gojira. Rather than the other way around. Or did you know that?

What's offensive No race/nationality/culture is immune from mangling speech. There's nothing derogatory about something everyone does. I pronounce milk "malk" and eggs "aigs". Is that because I'm Irish, Texan, or my unfortunate orthodontics experience?

Years ago I had a Datsun 240Z. In the front of the factory service manual was what we would call a ghosted or phantom view of the whole car. Some parts were translucent so you could see into the insides of things. It was labeled as "clairvoyant view". I always enjoyed that.
Rick

There is so much that translates badly into English because the language itself has been cobbled and pieced together from many other languages. "Clairvoyant" is a good example. The root definition is "clear vision".... nothing mystic about that unless you add implied meaning, which is what happened when the word got put into our language.

Quite true.

English is an amalgam of all the languages from the peoples who invaded/conquered/occupied England -- the language of the ancient Celts (who moved west from what is now Romania and Bulgaria around about 300 b.c.), Latin from the Romans, the languages of the Angles and the Saxons, Old Norse from the Vikings, Old French from the Normans -- with additional words from the many lands that the English invaded/conquered/occupied -- India, Africa, North America, etc.

English has the largest vocabulary of any language -- about 650,000 words, many of them synonyms and homonyms. German, with about 195,000 words, is a distant second. Most languages have between 60,000 and 100,000 words. So, when anybody attempts to translate a phrase from a language with few synonyms and homonyms to a language (like English) that is overloaded with them -- especially by a translator who isn't fluent in English -- some unintentional hilarity is to be expected.

A good example is the 1883 book English As She Is Spoke, which was an attempt by a Portuguese author to develop a Portuguese-English phrase book. Unfortunately, the author couldn't speak English, so he got a French-English dictionary and translated a Portuguese-French phrase book instead. The book is considered to be such a classic of unintentional humor that it is occasionally reprinted. (It's also available on Kindle.)

BTW, there's also a website dedicated to Engrish errors with photos of signs from around the world http://www.engrish.com/

While that is correct, English has contractions and possessive pronouns that make it a delight to speak. -and a royal PITA when translating into Romance languages as the text "grows" at least 10-15%

As an interpreter I love going from Spanish or Portuguese to English; going the other way, I'm always behind the speaker.

Example:
Spanish; ¿De donde vienes (tú)? .... Vengo de la casa de Pedro.
English; Where're you coming from? .... Pedro's.

But, those plurals... foot/feet, boot/beets????

There are a couple of books that are excellent English tutorials:
"Usage and Abusage", http://www.amazon.com/Usage-Abusage-Gui ... 0393317099
and "Eats, Shoots and Leaves", http://www.amazon.com/Eats-Shoots-Leave ... 1592400876

Enjoy!

Got me beat: Shouldn't that be "beet"?

Two words that I have always thought were really foggy to non-native speakers are fit and fat. Is fat past tense of fit? It COULD be, but it's not a conjugation of it. THEN, there's the other meaning of fit, which doesn't mean what it would in context with fat.

"fit" is an interesting word [ http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=fit ]

I don't see the problem with "fit" and "fat", --I am not a "native speaker" but learned English concurrently with my native language, though.

this is a real tongue twister of sorts: "have you read the red book Billy was told to read?"

There was a web site which no longer exists, where ethnic Chinese and Japanese people mocked tattoos, almost exclusively worn by Americans. The symbols are words, not letters, yet a LOT of tattoo parlors here in the States have books which show these characters translating to English letters. So people out of ignorance string symbols together, which creates literal nonsense.

The absolute best was a person who wanted, I THINK, her tattoo to say "Hot", er, "Poop". Instead, it translated to "Explosive Diarrhea".

John S.

Yep, but akin to the English language nonsense that gets printed on T-shirts that are worn in ignorance all over the world. But I guess you can discard a T-shirt.