It’s cute, but 可口可樂 (Kě kǒu kě lè) sounds nothing like 蝌蚪啃蠟 or 骒马口蠟 (Kè mǎ kǒu là) any dialect I have heard. Besides being a decent transliteration soundwise, it literally means tasty cola.
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Well, at least it wasn’t “crazy diarrhea.”
( hanzismatter.blogspot.com: "Crazy Diarrhea" )
It’s worse than that, as there’s a whole tattoo parlor practice of using flash sheets for Chinese character tattoos - that aren’t even actually Chinese characters. Someone created a particular flash sheet that spread like crazy that are just partial (or badly rendered) characters that they randomly associated with English letters as a kind of cypher. So they’re not even mistranslated, they’re just nonsense. So a lot of people aren’t even bothering with Google Translate, which would be bad enough.
Yeah, although Hanzismatter really uncovered the particular problem that exists with “Chinese” and “Japanese” tattoos - the widespread nature of the “gibberish font” and the reliance of tattoo parlors upon it, and customers who don’t even give it the slightest bit of consideration. (I mean - that anyone thinks “my initials in Chinese” makes any sense boggles my mind.)
In the US and other Western countries, I’d be very surprised if even one in five was correct. In between use of Google translate (often of individual elements, separately), fake Chinese characters beloved by tattooists, and often relying on the “translation” of someone who doesn’t remotely know the language… the odds aren’t good.
You’re still relying on the tattoo artist getting it right, though. Given how often they screw up English words, I hate to think about how often they’d leave out important bits of Kanji because it’s just a bunch of lines to them. (And I know that happens too, because I’ve seen tatts that did that.)
That’s… not how language works. It may have a particular symbolism for her, but that’s not the same as “meaning.”
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Perhaps you could have that conversation with the Japanese. They much prefer the more even visual appearance of Roman (English) characters, or Romanji, so you’ll frequently see phrases on Japanese clothing written in Romanji that make little sense in English.
Maybe you could raise the subject of ‘cultural appropriation’ while you’re at it…
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Or… you could? I’m probably not “the guy” you want for either of those jobs.
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Maybe she loves yakitori.
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Who doesn’t? I could go for some right now.
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Is this yet another web site I have to put on my list of “don’t read before dinner”? Dang it, I’m hungry now.
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THIS.
While Chinese and Japanese use the same characters, they can have different meanings. It appears that 七輪 refers to the seven chakras in Chinese, and only means “little grill” in Japanese.
If Grande said her tattoo was Japanese, then yeah, make fun of her (well, don’t, but ok go ahead). But the characters themselves have a sufficiently mystical meaning in Chinese to be appropriate for a tattoo, so all you people going on about the stupidity of it are showing a little lack of knowledge yourselves.
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You are right. Here is another example of bad use of characters:
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I wonder if the band Nikki Meets the Hibachi could sue?
But the best case scenario is a collaboration.
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haha, still doesn’t seem entirely inappropriate
The article says it was posted to her official Japanese Twitter account, but your concern is noted.
Welcome to BoingBoing!
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I must amend my previous comments since I found out that ‘Seven Rings’ refers to her new song, which is a take on My Favorite Things which celebrates unbridled materialism, and is about as far removed from the mysticism of the chakras as one could get. Listening to her song – the part I managed to get through, anyway – was a harrowing experience; I had to listen to John Coltrane’s decidedly more spiritual version of My Favorite Things to ward off her ill influence.
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Kanji can be weird. Like when you combine the kanji for “Buddha” and “country” you get “France”, or when you combine “tree” and “fire” you get “monkey inseminator”.
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While there are bad tattoos, there is no bad publicity. Seems to be working as intended.
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Were I a tattoo artist, I would probably require any Westerner seeking a Kanji tat to furnish a note from an accredited translator or at least linguist. Fortunately or unfortunately I have less than zero visual artistic talent; my ability to draw can best be described by negative values.
Language means whatever two or more interlocutors agree it means, and then only to them. A language of one is gibberish.
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She should have gotten it in Khuzdul.
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I suspect she wanted (in Mandarin, I don’t really know much Japanese) 七輪環 - essentially 7|measure-word|ring but decided it hurt and left off the actual noun
七 - seven
輪 (traditional) 轮 (simplified) - measure word for round things
環 (traditional) 环 (simplified) - ring
A measure word is sort of a classifier for when you are counting things - there are classifiers for animals, flat things, and in this case round things.
It would have hurt less if she’d had it done in simplified characters
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“There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”
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why do her hands look like clammy plastic?
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