Tired of Laughter, Beijing Gets Rid Of Bad Translations

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117063961235897853.html?mod=todays_us_page_one ^ | February 5, 2007 | MEI FONG

[NotJustAnotherPrettyFace]

Right next to the Sizzling Whor Bar or Ho Fun would be this place.......

[NotJustAnotherPrettyFace]

Pleselving at loom tempelatule? ;-)

[jonassen]

Haha. The main reason is that Chinese and Japanese writing, like Ancient Latin, don't use word spacing. So "out of sight" could very well be machine-translated as "invisible" without proper context.

[MoochPooch]

I may be wrong on this, since I'm not familiar with any non-European language, but the Chinese & Japanese strike me as very literal-minded. Maybe they have a hard time with English because of its high use of idioms. (Especially American English.)

[MoochPooch]

My bad. Actually, I'm familiar with Hebrew, which is also pretty literal.

Many of the English books coming out of Israel are poorly translated. Very dry, as well as literal. Not to mention the lack of quality control. Lots of typos, misspelled words. They're very careless there.

[T'wit]

Yike!

[T'wit]

>> Pleselving at loom tempelatule? ;-)

That's what they did to Saddam Hussein. Come to think of it, he was kind of a banana.

[Dad yer funny]

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