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I read an interesting article about why signs like that happen. In Chinese, there are many characters that are read as “kan,” including 干 (dry/dried) and 姦 (fuck). Evidently, the Chinese government merged a lot of characters together when they implemented Simplified Chinese characters, so the second “kan” got merged into the first, with the idea being that native speakers could tell the difference from context. Machine translation, however, cannot.
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Yup. That’s my understanding too. And the result is always hilarious.
ETA:
Chinese simplification improved literacy but that came with a cost. After all, they took the 心 out of 愛 when they simplified it to 爱. How heartless! (Thank you, I’ll be here all week. Try the fish.)
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There is an A sound exactly like the A in sack in Japanese. If you alphabetize the katakana it would be sakkingu with SA being the first letter as in Sapporo. It’s just an awesome typo not a deficiency of sounds within the Japanese language. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to googuru where the nearest Joful is.
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I live in China. These kinds of translations are everywhere and sometimes quite funny. What always confuses me is that it is not hard to find a foreigner who speaks both languages but they never seen to bother asking for help, which results in unintentional comedy.
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It’s the same here in Japan, and often they are so sure that something is right (often because their high school teacher told them so) that they won’t even listen when a foreigner tells them otherwise. I’ve had things I’ve translated turned into nonsense because somebody was sure that a certain word was better, even though that word is an adjective and the sentence structure calls for a noun.
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I was thinking “if I could self suck, do you think I’d be out in public in a store?”…
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The same is true for roughly 99% of Hollywood’s output whenever “foreign guy extra” has a few lines in their alleged mother tongue.
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Reminds me of an old NPR story about early L.A. Chinese restaurant menus with interesting errors. ex: Conflating “Rump Roast” with “Roast Pork” yielded “Pump Pork”.
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Isn’t Japanese “a” also commonly used to represent this particular kind of English “u”? E.g.:
- “cup” → カップ, kappu
- “butter” → バター, batā
- “jump” → ジャンプ, janpu
- “pub” → パブ, pabu
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If… well, you know.
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