I’ve read this one for years. If you haven’t been, it’s time to catch up.
Ah! Slowly and modern the contentment elicited by Chiff & Fipple tinwhistle journalism concern. My ancestors are happy.
My grandfather was an importer of toys who took yearly trips to the Orient back in the 40’s–60s. He always brought home samples for my sister and I of the toys and we would HOWL with laughter at the language misusages. Trust me, in recent years the Japanese and Chinese have gotten MUCH better at handling our difficult language.
My daughter works for a globalization company which produces instuctional material, training programs, commercials, etc. They have collected some real howlers over the years. One of the reasons things have improved is because companies like my daughters will not use translations by people who are not native speakers of the target language. They also must be certified by the American Translation Society. I use to work for them on and off programming training materials in multiple languages, usually English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French (Canadian).
Ron
I wonder, though, what it is linguistically about Japanese-to-English that tends to make it funny, as opposed to awkward. When I see bad translations from other languages, it just looks like, well, a bad translation.
I stopped noticing the silly English a long time ago.
The majority of these ‘engrish’ masterpieces, especially those on products, are purely decoration. Nobody reads them except the people who make sites like these.
I prefer this -
Anthony Hopkins is thrilling.
http://www.japander.com/japander/hopkins.htm
People of California. This is your governor.
http://www.japander.com/japander/schwarz.htm
Mukade