In the latest issue of Wired magazine, there was a piece titled "10 Best Things We'll Say to Our Grandkids".



According to the magazine, English translation for #6 is:

"English used to be the dominant language. Crazy, huh?"

Dr. Mair and I both noticed the printed Chinese is not correct.

统治语言 (dominate language), is two English phrases spliced together with an odd sense of colonialism. 官方語言 (official language) or 國際語言 (international language) would be better fitting.

疯狂 does not have the same contextual meaning as "crazy", rather "frenzied, unbridled; insane". In this case, a better phrase would be "傻不傻", or "isn't that silly?"

Perhaps this is a nod to Firefly, where mixture of Chinese Mandarin phrases were added into the show's dialogue.


Related: http://www.tian.cc/2007/08/wired-magazine-does-anyone-here-speak.html

from: Victor H. Mair
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com,
date: Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 12:00 PM
subject: tattoo

Hi Tian,

Perhaps you can post this for me on HANZISMATTER.

Victor

======

The attached picture, sent to me by Jonathan Smith, shows a basketball player's "Chinese" tattoos. They read 康女宀 from top to bottom: KANG1 ("peace, vigor") NÜ3 ("woman") MIAN2 ("shelter, thatch"). Yet the proud owner claims that they are "my initials in Chinese, M.A.D."



My best guess as to how this may have happened is that the basketball player approached a tattooist who was minimally literate (or illiterate) in Chinese or English (or both) and showed him / her his initials, requesting the tattooist to "write them in Chinese symbols / characters / ideographs / hieroglyphs / pictographs / whatever." The initials may have been more or less ornately written, with the result that the tattooist came up with these three HANZI as his / her best representation of what he / she was seeing. For example, if you twist 女 around in different orientations, you can sort of see an "A" there. Ditto for the other two HANZI.

=======

victor

--

Victor H. Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature
Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
University of Pennsylvania

Peter has forward me this interesting story about a woman's tattoo experience.

"I have four Japanese symbols across my back, gleaned from a Japanese-English dictionary.

...

Yes, it would seem that in our haste, nobody took the semicolon from the dictionary entry out of the design and it now lives for eternity on my skin."


http://ittybiz.com/moral-of-the-story-topless-edition-with-photos/

Peter and I are shaking our heads regarding:

She is apparently more upset that there's a semicolon attached to her tattoo than by the fact that the tattoo itself is terribly done.

According to the tattoo's owner, Naomi Dunford, "It was supposed to say 'Mother Daughter Sister Wife'. Then wife was a pain in the ass and it was supposed to say 'beauty.' Who the hell knows what it means at this point?"

from: Amilcar C.
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 8:08 AM

Hello,

Congrats for the cool blog.

A colleague has this tattoo done a couple of years ago and she was told it is suppose to mean “strength”.

Does it really mean that or anything else at all?

Thanks,

Amilcar C.



小畜 originated from the book of I Ching, meaning "small accumulating". Other variations include "the taming power of the small" and "small harvest". I don't see the connection between that and "strength", unless there is some kind of six degrees of Kevin Bacon I Ching I didn't know about.

from: Kama
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 12:51 AM
subject: tattoo request

HanziSmatter site is amazing, great idea :) I love reading it. Chinese and Japanese characters looks great, but I still don't understand why people are tattooing their names in those languages, when they come from German, England or Poland, like me.

I guess they want to look cool, like my friend, who is 100% sure that he has "Julia" tattoo on his left hand.

Is he? Please, help me to translate it right (if it's not ok) because he is playing so smart, that would be a pleasure to prove him wrong ;)

Greetings from Poland,

Kama



珠丽娅 is an acceptable phonetic Chinese translation for Julia, however all characters were done mirrored.

from: Johan
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 9:41 PM
subject: Look at this Arrivals sign from Sweden

This is from Arlanda, Stockholm's international airport. They have a lot of these signs.

In Sweden, we pride ourselves on being way better than everybody else, by the way.

Johan, Sweden



It appears manufacturer of the sign did not have correct language and fonts pack installed. Instead of displaying 到達 (arrivals), the second character showed up as a rectangular box.

Help with translation - Faith, Hope and Love!

from: Erik F.
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 9:32 AM
subject: Help with translation - Faith, Hope and Love!

Hey there!

My friend went to Turkey and got himself a tattoo in chinese or japanese. According to him it says "Faith, hope and love", but being the sceptical person I am, I thought I should send a picture to you to verify.

Does it really say that, or is this another case of "Prepaid Public Transportation Card"? (A part of me is hoping it is!)

Thanks for your time!

sincerely,

Erik



To one that is only familiar with Chinese or Japanese, this tattoo would be gibberish.

A quick look via Google Translator, I soon realized this is Chinese phonetic translation of Turkish, where Faith is "inanc" (伊南), Hope is "umut" (乌穆特), and Love is "ask" (阿士克).

The irony is with current situation in Xinjiang, China, were most ethnic Turks reside, Chinese and Turks are not on the best of terms.

Why would anyone stupid enough to get a Turkish phrase to be phonetically translated & tattooed in Chinese? It's like begging to be the Lucky Pierre in middle of an ethnic conflict.