How are you gentlemen?

[Hoichi]

All your base are belong to us.
You are on the way to destruction.
You have no chance to survive make your tme.
HA HA HA HA ...

The Mistranslation thread! Sometimes translation errors leave unexpectedly humour results. Perhaps the funniest occured when Pepsi was released to China with the most bizarre advertizing slogan that any product has ever had. What was the slogan?


"Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead"

Obviously not written by a native speaker of Mandarin, Cantonese or any language in China. Hell, it probable wasn't translated by anyone with any substantial knowledge of Chinese languages.

[McOod]

Coca Cola was even funnier.

In Mandarin Chinese, a language very sensitive to pronounciation, Coca Cola phonetically translates as "Bite the Wax Tadpole" or "A horse filled with wax".

They changed the pronounciation to something that translated to "Happiness in the mouth".

[Hoichi]

I heard about that. The problem came about when Coca-Cola was first introduced in China leaving local storekeepers to make the name out of Hanzi. The two you mentioned are the most amusing and famous of the renditions of ''Coca-Cola'' into Hanzi but storekeepers used a variety of different Hanzi characters also. A great lessen in the dangers of not releasing an official name for a country with a different alphabet.

One of the most infamous forms of ''mistranslation'' is more to do with a mispronunciation than mistranslation itself; Engrish. ''Engrish'' is an attempt at English by non-professionals with minimal qualifications in this language. It is found in Korean and Japan due to the confusion between English Rs and Ls; in both Japanese and Korean, the R and L sounds are usually really a ''Th'' as in ''The'' (when it is pronounced correctly and not as ''thee''. In other words when the ''Th'' is less like a ''f'' and more a mix of D, L and R.) Due to this foreign tourists in Korea may be shocked to fit that ''crap'' (in truth ''crab'') is on the menu and that people listen to Eric Crapton.
















Other Mistakes:





Please Note: My post is not made to insult or denigrate those who speak English...well, badly. English is a hard language to learn despite the fact that it is the international language. However, this post sees nothing wrong with viewing the products (risqué or otherwise) of simply mistakes (and my partner has made a few similar mistakes anyway) humorously.

[armadillozenith]

I love these unintended and quite innocently amusing occurrences!