Some Things Just Don't Translate

I think I've been a touch too serious lately. At any rate, I needed to lighten up, and maybe my blog does, too. I nearly pulled a belly muscle browsing the "adult" section of Engrish.com. It's all in pretty terrible taste. That's the point.

Anyway, here's a little sample. This one might make a splash in the classroom when I teach about the beauty ideal, dontcha think?

(From Engrish.com)

And this sounds like a delightful contrast to all that heavy Thanksgiving fare ... yum!

(Also from Engrish.com)

I've admittedly got a weakness for this sort of thing** after living in Germany, where similarly tasteless slogans popped up on the occasional T-shirt, along with just plain goofy logos like the "San Francisco Fifty-Niners." I think people get their ideas of socially acceptable English partly from R-rated movies (oops!). The translator in me is smugly gleeful, knowing that the world will always need translators who are adept in both language and culture.

(** Language bloopers, I mean - what did you think? Oh, the tofu. Right.)

Best Penis Spam Ever

I got a couple of spam emails yesterday that showed just how much can, in fact, be lost in translation. The subject lines were precious enough:

Great shlong is your main weapon
Don't be looser enlarge your machine

They also promised to enlarge my

jang Width (Girth) By upto 20%

Can someone please tell me what the heck a jang is? Maybe a contraction of jumbo wang?

What really closed the deal was their final selling point:

Erection_will_be_mush_harder

Gives a whole 'nother meaning to phrases like mushy love scene, doesn't it?

Not Lost in Translation

One of the things I do when I'm not chasing kids or teaching women's studies is German-to-English translation work. I have a few hard limits – I don't do literary or legal stuff – but otherwise I'm pretty shameless about what I'll try. I've done technical and marketing projects as well as more scholarly material. And years ago I helped with the Porsche customer magazine, with lots of spousal help on the hardcore automotive concepts.

Usually the translator is invisible if not downright inglorious. I mean inglorious in the sense of "obscure," not "disgraceful," though we've all seen translations that are downright embarrassing. User instructions are another hard limit of mine, so that trainwreck of a manual that came with your DVD player? I'm innocent.

I think some authors prefer to give the impression that their work is wholly their own. But I just got a copy of a book I worked on last summer, and my name is actually in it! Okay, it's on the last page, and since I'm listed as being in "Athens" I could be mistaken as being Greek. (A very, very pale Greek.) But my name is spelled right, thanks to my awesome friend who did a beautiful job on the copyediting. And I'm included even though I got sucked into the project at the last minute after some unspecified glitch with another translator. I'm tickled pink!

The book - Asia: Changing the World - also has a sexy cover. You can't tell from the picture, but it's got a translucent gray-green jacket that gives you a flirtatious peek at the underlying Asian symbols and characters. Plus, the book was free, and I'm still enough of a grad student at heart to be happy about free books.