Hi everyone,
here's another image from Engrish.com.
The text reads:
Attention
Honorific Guest:
Thank you to come our Linnan Inn, and invite you to cherish to take good care of the inn's hygiene facilities, such as the towel ined by you damaged. Foul stuff, will from your personal and responsible for indemniflcation moreover invite your right. Defend that mattress that fall down, if the immodesty fall down the guest complacent. Please treasure resources, water and power conservation.
Thank you for your visite again.
Linnan Inn
"Sure, i'd "visite" again to defend the mattress." :P
What do you think?
19 comments:
Everything is literally translated from Mandarin. Think it's quite a common scene in China, isn't it? :P
Yvonne
From the beginning of the whole paragraph, there are tons of mistakes; from the usage of the verbs to tenses and the sentence structure.I had a hard time understanding what this notice is telling me.
I find this sentence weird. 'Defend that mattress that fall down, if the immodesty fall down the guest complacent.' Are they trying to tell me 'immodesty' a abstract noun can trip a guest? Perhaps it should be written 'your immodesty' may resulted in an accident.
From this sentence 'Thank you for your visite again', the word 'visite' shouldn't it be 'visitation'?
My humble comment. Cynthia
i have to agree with Yvonne. Sounds like a total direct translation. =)
Raudha
Its really tough to understand what the whole text means. It has dozens of errors, be it with the spelling errors, grammatical errors and the word structure. Generally, I feel that most businessmen who are not really that English-educated, tend to take this matter lightly. As long as the restaurant'snotice in Chinese language is perfectly correct, it really doesn't matter if the English-written notice falls apart. To them, it is not so much about the notices, but the food that is being served to the customers. Bottomline is, these businessmen just want to earn money.
I recalled this hilarious conversation with my friend, Raudha. She told me about a notice that she spotted while in Malaysia. It reads "BEWARE OF THE CAT". Now, for those people who are able to read English, they may ask questions such as 'what cat should I be aware of?? But the thing is, is not about the cat that you should be worried for. Actually, what the notice meant (in Malaysia) is that beware of the 'paint'. This is because 'cat' means paint in English. So, I reckon that they combined both malay and english words together in the notice. Since they knew very well that all Malaysians can speak Malay! I had a good laugh with Raudha. I pity those tourists or those people who can't read Malay, they will be scratching their heads as to what the notice really means. :)
Btw, no offence to anyone. This is just a real notice that I think it's worth reflecting on and understand the different cultures and styles of different countries.
Cheers,
Nita :)
Seriously its really tough to decipher the whole paragraph into proper english..because according to how its written, its very hard to understand what they really meant. Unless you can read the Chinese wordings and translate. I wonder which foreigner can truely understand what it means..haha
Gion
The first thing that caught my eye was the word "Honorific". At first look, I thought it was "Horrific"!
The sentence structure of the paragraph are not right as it seems to be directly translated from the chinese language. As a result, the intended message became distorted and the readers may have problems understanding what the management was trying to bring across.
Just sharing my 2 cents worth :)
Celine
wow... this would be a real challenge to correct. i can't even guess what half the message is trying to say. woe be to the teacher whose student writes like that. =P
what's that mattress made of anyway, for them to ask all of the guests to defend it? =X
Honorable Guest,
Thank you for coming to Linnan Inn. We invite you to take good care of the inn's facilities, such as the towels. We will hold you responsible for any damaged items. Please don't be complacent if the mattress fall down. We hope you will help us to conserve power and water. Thank you and we hope to see you again soon.
Linnan Inn
> okay classmates, the above is how i interpret as a non-Chinese trying to make meaning of the sign.
sahrina
I have to agree with sahrina. If I were to do a 'proper' write up, it would most probably read the same as sahrina's. As per the majority had mentioned, it does seem like a direct translation from Mandarin as well. Thought I do not under Mandarin that well, certain phrase of the notice does seem directly translated. I guess it would be easy for someone of slight Mandarin knowledge to understand this notice, however it would be difficult especially for those who has no prior knowledge of Mandarin.
Ralleeah
When I first read it, I was totally confused. :p The sentences doesn't make any sense. Agree with yvonne.
Woah! The person who wrote this must have used a chinese-english dictionary to translate word by word, thinking that it would still make sense. This is really a 'foul stuff'.
Siti
Think that was JIA JIA..who wrote that Informative piece.. my ex student lor..hehehehe
hey guys. I think this topic is on social variation. The direct translation from Chinese to English.
I am sure this is a common scene in China but I have seen it in Singapore itself. Chinatown. =P
I was wondering.. why didn't the shop owners ask those who are English educated to check the signage for any grammar mistakes and make amendments before sending it for printing. This way shop owners do not have to go through embarrassement if others see it. Moreover, they do not have to fork out more money to change the words.
Amaluna... =)
Yeah it sounds as though the person have no idea what standard english is. It may seem like direct translation. I think i received funny emails like this before. Sorry, deleted it ages agooooo.hehe.
martinei
haha!i cant stop laughing after reading this as it's really difficult to understand. Now, i realise how important to speak standard english. hehe.
-Nuraini-
OMG! What happened to their English?
wahhahah, funny stuff. Anyway u guys should also check out this url http://www.rockson.blogspot.com/
pretty interesting usage of english and hokkien in our local context. Anyways is not suitable for those under the age of 18 due to the usage of coarse and harsh language. Its funny as hell.
Last time i heard, the author is actually a lawyer. Go figure! LOL
english is hard to learn if started from an early age. But what happens if we start a wee bit too late
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWdcrUuUgJc
That is the result of taking the whole chunck of chinese text, plop it inside the online translator and then extract the results from the translator to use as the full translation. There are no perfect machine translator as of now.
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