Engrish (9/10)

Surrender now, or face the wrath of my
...rice cooker

Asia is absolutely brimming with mistranslations, from the ten foot high signs throughout Seoul announcing the "Grand Open!" of a major store chain, to the label on my washing machine that proudly declares it uses "fuzzy logic". These mistranslations have always bothered me. If you're going to spend thousands, or perhaps millions, on advertising and packaging for a product, why not go through the small trouble of asking a native speaker to look for errors? In most cases this could probably be done for free: someone's uncle's roommate's ex-girlfriend's sister always knows someone who speaks English, why not ask them?

As I sat in a crowded microbus I stared at the box which the person facing me held in their lap. It was a rice cooker, or so it seemed to claim. This may have been a misunderstanding on my part, for it also said it was "constructed eternally" and had "many levels". I was forced to conclude that the person across from me was holding a miniaturized version of Buddhist heaven.

Reading on, I revised this idea to include the notion that the box also contained various levels of hell. At the top of the list of features it read "NOW WITH MORE FIREPOWER!"

I realized that the thing in this box must be very valuable indeed: a weapon of awesome destructive force forged on the anvil of the heavens by the ancient gods, a weapon to command respect and obedience for all mortals.

And truly, a fine rice cooker.

I think I've figured out why there are so many mistranslations. No one cares. The purpose of the English words in ads and on boxes is like the purpose of French words spoken by an American guy to his girlfriend. He could be (and probably is) reciting his grocery list verbatim, but that's not the issue. The thing is, it's in French.

Likewise a t-shirt can say "Get used" here, and draw odd looks from passing Aussies, Americans and Brits. The looks don't matter. The shirt is in English, and English is almost as popular as Hello Kitty. Meaning, in contrast, is decidedly less popular, and is usually relegated to dusty places such as this staff room.

Small side joke for those who speak some Mongolian: I was teaching class just now and ran across a sentence that included the name "Bob". After I read the sentence the two guys in the class tried to hold back snickers, then burst out laughing. I quickly realized what I had done, which didn't help matters because then I burst out laughing. The two women in the class looked on the scene with disdain. It took quite some time to restore order and move on. I told the other teacher about the occurrence, and warned him not to use the name Bob. He checked to make sure his pronunciation of the related Mongolian word was correct, then went off to try it out on the unsuspecting staff.

Yea... if you don't know Mongolian you probably get it anyway.