It Cremates Of Greenness

September 24, 2017 3:49 PM

Translation Fails (SLBFL)
posted by Johnny Wallflower (41 comments total)

The Syrian Paralysis Cheese! Do you suppose that is why things got so out of hand, over there? Syrian Paralysis Cheese is the answer to everything, from now on.
posted by Oyéah at 4:05 PM on September 24, 2017

The "clean bitch" from Portugal is funny, but it will never surpass the sign for "percebes," which are goose barnacles but which is also a form of the verb "to understand."

Thus "we sell understands"
posted by chavenet at 4:13 PM on September 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

due to happenstance
beyonde our controll this
elevator is so
broken

This is basically indistinguishable from some of the poetry I've written :/
posted by btfreek at 4:20 PM on September 24, 2017 [16 favorites]

I'm still trying to figure out what SLBFL means. Single link bored fail link?
posted by clawsoon at 4:26 PM on September 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

I'd guess Single Link Boredpanda Fail List, but I think SLBP (Single Link Bored Panda) should be the standard.
posted by oneswellfoop at 4:31 PM on September 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

The "clean bitch" looks obviously (and poorly) manipulated to me? Like, the "itch" isn't the same font size as the rest of the text and is somewhat off the baseline of the other text on the line, and then there's that gap before the exclamation point. It seems entirely likely that it was a perfectly reasonable and ordinary "clean beach" and someone 'shopped it for the luls.
posted by NMcCoy at 4:33 PM on September 24, 2017 [5 favorites]

It stands for Single-Link BuzzFeed Listicle. Which is a cognition fail on my part.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:34 PM on September 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

My favorite translation success: cow butter fruit. The literal Chinese translation (per a friend) for avocado.
posted by bunbury at 5:19 PM on September 24, 2017 [4 favorites]

Bunbury, I was just thinking about that while eating an avocado for breakfast this morning! Or, more precisely, the fact that the literal translation for "butter" is "cow oil" (so I would argue that it's really cow oil fruit, or maybe butter fruit, which is more sensible but less funny) but then "lard" is "pig oil", so where does that leave, say, tallow or suet...
posted by btfreek at 5:31 PM on September 24, 2017

These were cute and (mostly) understandable "lost in translation" fails but I lost it at #33. Don't even try it, Manuel!

These remind me of a dish at a local Korean restaurant that I've yet to order: Spicy Steamed Crotch.

(Spoiler alert: it's 아구찜 aka spicy braised monkfish but that doesn't stop me from giggling when I see the translation.)
posted by paisley sheep at 5:37 PM on September 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

Re: restroom/place of worship-

I've often hugged a toilet going "Oh God, I'm sick".
posted by pjern at 5:37 PM on September 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

These were cute and (mostly) understandable "lost in translation" fails but I lost it at #33. Don't even try it, Manuel!

I'm pleased to know I'm not the only person who found that one unduly amusing.
WILL YOU CUT IT OUT WITH THE DOORS ALREADY, MANUEL

Also a fan of DO NOT CRY.
posted by eponym at 6:04 PM on September 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

Bored Panda has the dadliest comments.
posted by Tad Naff at 6:52 PM on September 24, 2017

Here's one I took a while back in the city I used to live in. Presumably they were going for something like "Why don't you try it too?" but uh

Also, I found out while just messing around with the "new and improved" Google Translate last year that the random phrase I typed in — あっさりとした水出しコーヒー, or "cold-brewed coffee with a light flavor" — was wildly mistranslated as "watery coffee with plenty of water."
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:17 PM on September 24, 2017 [6 favorites]

Ah, I just got the "Paul is Dead" one. The first thing you need to know is that "meat" sounds sort of like the Arabic word for "dead", which is why another slide shows a shop selling "chicken murder". The other thing is, the Arabic alphabet has no equivalent for the English letter "p", and many native speakers can't even recognise the sound as being distinct from "b". So for a native speaker, the English word "ball" and the name "Paul" are conceptually identical. They might be able to distinguish them at the time, but it's as if they get filed away in the same place.

So what probably happened was, an employee was told to write "meat ball", and they did a Google search using an Arabic transcription to find the English transliteration. Google understands the first word as "dead" and it's smart enough to know that the Arabic letter "bā’" may be transcribed as either "p" or "b". There are lots of websites with the phrase "Paul is Dead", many more than the number with "ball dead", so it guesses that that must be what is meant. Hence the fail.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:19 PM on September 24, 2017 [15 favorites]

I desperately want to try Syrian Paralysis Cheese.
posted by medusa at 7:37 PM on September 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

And Lemongrass Frog Technology.
posted by medusa at 7:41 PM on September 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

Might as well try the Smallpox Pizza while I'm at it.
posted by medusa at 7:48 PM on September 24, 2017

I always like the first page of the boredpanda listicles, but then they make me click to page two of 17 or so to load all the ads and grind through the presentation again and I kind of lose interest.
posted by yhbc at 7:55 PM on September 24, 2017 [8 favorites]

Once in a Japanese airport we saw a sign for a wheelchair ramp labeled in English as "Accessible Slope." That's kind of a mistranslation but it's immediately clear what it means, and we were sleep deprived enough to think it was the best phrase ever. We still refer to ramps of all kinds as accessible slopes.
posted by medusa at 8:04 PM on September 24, 2017 [7 favorites]

Part of my job (like DoctorFedora, I imagine) is making sure these don't escape into the wild, so I should be able to remember more of them than I have at hand (industrial translation in particular lends itself to some really NSFW results, some of them not even inaccurate).
I still have a couple of favorites seen in passing: a sign leading to the outer deck of a ferry saying "Door Will Be Closed in Rouge Weather" (watch out for the flying lipsticks) and a notice in a music store advertising a band's "bland new album." Um....
posted by huimangm at 8:11 PM on September 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

Medusa, yeah, the Japanese term for a wheelchair ramp is "slope," presumably from UK English? (I've at least heard tourists here with clearly English accents casually referring to there being a slope at one entrance of the building). "Accessible" is almost certainly a bit of tryhard, admittedly.
posted by DoctorFedora at 9:06 PM on September 24, 2017

I am desperately curious about the Pandemonium Salad. I hope it's just some really boisterous greens and not something panda-related.
posted by Mary Ellen Carter at 9:40 PM on September 24, 2017

> My favorite translation success: cow butter fruit. The literal Chinese translation (per a friend) for avocado.

> Bunbury, I was just thinking about that while eating an avocado for breakfast this morning! Or, more precisely, the fact that the literal translation for "butter" is "cow oil" (so I would argue that it's really cow oil fruit, or maybe butter fruit, which is more sensible but less funny) but then "lard" is "pig oil", so where does that leave, say, tallow or suet...

牛油果 is one of the possible names for avocado or Persea americana fruit. The Chinese compound noun should be parsed as [牛油][果] = [butter][fruit], which is more or less semantically unsurprising given the texture of the fruit. Here 牛油 is again a compound noun made from 牛 = cow, bovine, cattle and 油 = oil, fat, grease. So that's how a cow can appear there.

The twist is that 牛油 is quite ambiguous. Depending on dialect and context it could either refer to butter or beef tallow or even suet. Where 牛油 = beef tallow, 黄油 (lit. "yellow fat") is used for butter (cf. buttercup).

Personally I'd stick with 鳄梨 = literal calque of "alligator pear", despite the triple accusation that that English origin is linguistically and factually questionable, and that calques are disturbing in general, and that the particular calquing is not even done "right", for 鳄 refers to the any generic reptile in the whole order of Crocodilia, not just the alligators. On this matter I am my own avocat.
posted by runcifex at 10:16 PM on September 24, 2017 [18 favorites]

I am desperately curious about the Pandemonium Salad.

I'm guessing the original meaning was "mixed" or something like that.
posted by Dr Dracator at 10:19 PM on September 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

I remember learning 油梨, or "oil pear". Google Translate seems to have heard it before, so I might not be totally wrong.
posted by lumensimus at 1:48 AM on September 25, 2017

> I remember learning 油梨, or "oil pear". Google Translate seems to have heard it before, so I might not be totally wrong.

You're not wrong. That's another alternative.
posted by runcifex at 1:54 AM on September 25, 2017

The other thing is, the Arabic alphabet has no equivalent for the English letter "p", and many native speakers can't even recognize the sound as being distinct from "b".

Nice explanation. That also explains Page 2's "Porn Fashion" store and Page 3's "boneless lamp."
posted by Emily's Fist at 3:01 AM on September 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

I used to work in Chile, where I became a great fan of "Crusty crap, with its meats."
posted by deadbilly at 3:26 AM on September 25, 2017

What did we do for translation fails before Google? I’ll tell you.

My family hosted an exchange student from Recife, Brazil, and he wanted to tell us that the symbol of his city was a rooster, but he didn’t know the word for rooster. So he explained that the symbol of his city was “the animal that fucks the chickens.”

Google has taken so much from us.
posted by infinitewindow at 4:44 AM on September 25, 2017 [21 favorites]

If anyone is still puzzled, "rape the sailor" should have been "sailor-style monkfish" or "monkfish à la marinière".
posted by sukeban at 5:04 AM on September 25, 2017

due to happenstance
beyonde our controll this
elevator is delicious
so sweet
and so cold
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 5:43 AM on September 25, 2017 [3 favorites]

What did we do for translation fails before Google?

Google was beaten to the scene by Babelfish.

In French, the word still (in the sense of, "Do you still want to go out tonight?") is sometimes toujours, which more frequently means "always," and sometimes encore, which more typically signifies "again." As an anglo, I am never 100% sure which is the best choice.

Years ago in the Babelfish era, I sought to clarify which was used when. I plugged in a half-dozen example sentences into Babelfish with growing chagrin: in each case, "still" was rendered as distillateur, which is of course not that useful.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:59 AM on September 25, 2017 [4 favorites]

I am desperately curious about the Pandemonium Salad.

Check with the Night Salad Manager
posted by Segundus at 7:03 AM on September 25, 2017 [2 favorites]

I wonder if on their quest for enlightenment the Beatles saw one of the Paul is Dead buffets.
posted by Nanukthedog at 8:00 AM on September 25, 2017

that calques are disturbing in general

When it comes to calques, laissez les bons temps rouler, says I.
posted by solotoro at 9:56 AM on September 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

I once saw a restaurant menu in Syria which featured Stuffed Aborigines and Chicken with Herpes.
posted by the duck by the oboe at 1:49 PM on September 25, 2017

I imagine that the Syrian Paralysis Cheese would be some Middle Eastern dairy equivalent of fugu; cheese cultured with a neurotoxin that induces an exquisitely pleasurable delirium which, as long as it's taken in exactly the right dose, is temporary. Some say that, at the height of the trance, one gazes upon the face of God Himself, and receives the secrets of creation. Finding the right dose, however, is not simple; there is a formula, factoring in one's height, weight and physiognomy, as well as the current temperature, humidity, wind direction, proximity of the sea, direction to Mecca and the positions of celestial bodies, but it is a tightly guarded secret. There are many false formulae throughout the souks of Araby and all the way along the Silk Road, and graves are full of those who trusted in them.
posted by acb at 4:16 PM on September 25, 2017 [2 favorites]

In French, the word still (in the sense of, "Do you still want to go out tonight?") is sometimes toujours, which more frequently means "always," and sometimes encore, which more typically signifies "again." As an anglo, I am never 100% sure which is the best choice.

Years ago in the Babelfish era, I sought to clarify which was used when. I plugged in a half-dozen example sentences into Babelfish with growing chagrin: in each case, "still" was rendered as distillateur, which is of course not that useful.

I shall be happy to oblige. "Toujours" is used when "still" is meant in a sense of positive continuation. For instance: tu veux toujours sortir ce soir ? "Encore" is used when "still" is meant in a sense of negative continuation. Example: qui utilise encore un stylo et du papier ?? It is a bit more subtle than that too, since switching the first example with "encore" would mean "again" rather than "still" since it's a specific thing being done as opposed to the second example that's a general Thing People Do (sorry for this run-on sentence), but it is the general gist.

Normally I have mistranslation examples but am all languaged out today.
posted by fraula at 12:15 PM on September 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

Re: #16, "Than 'Q' For Not Smoking," translated from an Indian language (don't know which one): many of my Indian colleagues wrote "ThanQ" for "thank you" in business communications. I mean, it saves characters on Twitter!
posted by AFABulous at 4:05 PM on September 26, 2017

AFABulous, that's Tamil! I took lessons when I was in middle school, it's wickedly hard to learn.
posted by scruffy-looking nerfherder at 6:59 PM on September 26, 2017