No Bicycle Parkig Area

No Bicycle Parkig Area
Originally uploaded by nofrills.

A multi-lingual sign (Japanese out of the frame) for "Narrow Street: Do not leave your bike here" in English (with something slightly odd) and in Chinese.

Where's his/her English teacher?!

Where's his/her English teacher?!
Originally uploaded by nofrills.

言語としては限りなく意味不明に近いメッセージであるばかりでなく、「３単現のs」を堂々と忘れておりますがな・・・有楽町のマリオンの斜向かいのような場所にあるビルにて発見。I never get upset with this sort of grammar mistake, but in fact this is found in Ginza/Yurakucho area ... where posh people want to buy their fashionable things, and where there are so many overseas visitors. And this poster was everywhere in the building (shopping mall) just opposite of Marion Tower. If only they had paid 1,000 yen or so to have this slogan checked! I know they seldom hire a translator or an English teacher for this kind of "small" jobs, but please do somthing to stop this sort of 恥ずかしい mistakes, especially in a place like Ginza/Yurakucho area!!!

... And I get a comment by a flickr user, who tried to translate my Japanese text with Google translator. Well, in fact, the Google translator is the last choice for the Japanese language. My reply to the comment is:

Well, in fact, google translator for English and Japanese is still in Beta itself. As far as I know, there are several other better machine translation engines out there. I only try out the English to Japanese translations (not J to E), but I wrote in September 2006, and in February 2006 on my blog (in Japanese).

Whether they are cr@p or not ... it depends on what you want to translate. You can't really "translate" the spoken Japanese language with translation engines. Imagine when you write "your kind" instead of "you are kind" and put it on the machine translator. Even if it's in French, Spanish or German (Indo-European languages), the result would be funny.

Basically, what makes machine translations difficult is that English and Japanese have almost nothing in common linguistically. Moreover, my description above in Japanese is written in "spoken" style - slangish, and has a lot in our cultural/sub-cultural context (the phrases like 限りなく, and 意味不明). I know there are differences between "written" and "spoken" English, but in the Japanese language, the difference is far bigger. I tried to explain about this here (in English), only a little bit.

And they don't seem to know our abbreviations. For instance, "３単現" is short for "３人称単数現在", which is "third person, singular, present". The google returned this as "s of 3 single realities", as a result of a mistranslation of "現" - the machine took it for "現実 reality", not "現在 present". (Basically "現" means "real", and the theory is that something present is something real.)

This sort of confusion is often with English speakers who are learning Japanese, or who know a bit of Japanese. The other day I heard Al Gore speaking in a TV program. He was saying "In Japanese, 危機 means not only crisis but also chance because the kanji 機 means chance." Interesting, but I'm afraid it's not linguistically correct. In this case, 機 means "occasion", not "chance". If it's 機会, the same kanji means "chance". And the same 機 is used in the word 機械, which means "machine" or "machinery".

By the way, the phrase here in the picture, "It enjoy spring", seems to be from machine translation of "春を楽しむ", but if it had been so, well, a machine wouldn't have dropped the "s" in "it enjoys" (third person singular). And every Japanese learns English in the compulsory edication, and the "s" is one of the first things we learn. So it's a shame that nobody corrected this error here, even though there must have been at least three people concerned (the copy-writer and/or the designer, someone at the printing factory, and the manager at this building).

Anyway I performed some machine translations of "春を楽しむ", just for fun. (Note that I omitted the subject in the original sentence. This is our normal way of talking/writing.)

- Google result: The spring is enjoyed.
- Altavista result: The spring is enjoyed.
- Yahoo Japan result: I enjoy spring.
- infoseek result: I enjoy spring.
- excite result: It enjoys springing.

Human translation (by me):
- Enjoy spring!
- Enjoy springtime!
- Spring has come!
- Everybody loves spring!
- Why not love spring!
- It's spring so spend yer f***ing money! :-P

If I were the copywriter, I would have used "Everybody loves spring!" but it would have been rejected by the management because it is "too difficult ('love' is sort of polysemic)", and I would have gone insane. In most cases, English (or Engrish) phrases on the street are not for the "message". They just want something that plays an "eye-catching role". The word "enjoy" is very catchy, and being cachy is everything, with nothing else wanted.

About the "difficulty" of J to E translation in general, read this thread and below in flickr OiJ group.

languages on a cadbury choc 03

languages on a cadbury choc 03
Originally uploaded by nofrills.

BEST VIEWED LARGE.

The rear side of the Cadbury Finger Chocolate package (for export) I found the other day at my local supermarket has a variety of languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Portguese, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Russian, Greek, Polish, Chech, Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese.

Different pictures are here and here.

languages on a cadbury choc 02

languages on a cadbury choc 02
Originally uploaded by nofrills.

BEST VIEWED LARGE.

The rear side of the Cadbury Finger Chocolate package (for export) I found the other day at my local supermarket has a variety of languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Portguese, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Russian, Greek, Polish, Chech, Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese.

Different pictures are here and here.

languages on a cadbury choc 01

languages on a cadbury choc 01
Originally uploaded by nofrills.

BEST VIEWED LARGE.

The rear side of the Cadbury Finger Chocolate package (for export) I found the other day at my local supermarket has a variety of languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Portguese, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Russian, Greek, Polish, Chech, Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese.

Different pictures are here and here.

cadbury logo

cadbury logo
Originally uploaded by nofrills.

I like macro. I like doing stupid things with my camera.

language variety on cadbury's choc

language variety on cadbury's choc
Originally uploaded by nofrills.

I think this is a good source for learning several languages at one time. Seriously, you can look at the word "sugar", for example.

There are English, French, German, Spanish, Portguese, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish (mmm, difficult), Russian (this is very difficult), Greek (very difficult), Polish (difficult), Chech (difficult), Arabic (you'll need at least 30 days to learn the letters), Japanese (my native tongue so no problem for me), and Chinese (the characters are the same so I can guess to some extent).

In this picture, there are Norwegian (blurred), Danish, Finnish, Russian, Greek, Polish, Chech, Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese (blurred).

languages on cadbury's choc

languages on cadbury's choc
Originally uploaded by nofrills.

For Cadbury to export. For us to know different languages.

On the rear side of the chocolate box, there are English, French, German, Spanish, Portguese, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Russian, Greek, Polish, Chech, Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese.

in English, et en Francais

in English, et en Francais
Originally uploaded by nofrills.

cadbury choc

cadbury choc
Originally uploaded by nofrills.

Yay! A surprise at my local supermarket in Tokyo. (They don't usually stock Cadbury's.)

engrish, probably.

engrish, probably.
Originally uploaded by nofrills.

floor mat that reads "elegance cleaning". reminds me of www.engrish.com/ website.

and here, "cleaning" is " laundry".

a variety of languages as seen in dictionaries

a variety of languages as seen in dictionaries
Originally uploaded by nofrills.

English-Japanese, Chinese-Japanese, French-Japanese, etc.

more languages!

more languages!
Originally uploaded by nofrills.

... And this lady seems to be living in Basque and Cornwall at the same time!

languages!

languages!
Originally uploaded by nofrills.

At a large regular bookstore, I found EuroTalk series' Japanese edition. From what I see, the same lady is introducing Pekingnese, Cantonese and Korean(!): different lady introduces several south-Asian languages.