Most funny translation mistakes on signs and menus come from the same few causes: a word with two meanings, a dictionary or app that picks the wrong one, and nobody who speaks the target language checking the result before it is printed. The thirty photos below, gathered from airports, shops, restaurants and public toilets, show each of those traps in action, and most of them can be traced back to the exact word that went astray.
The cover pairs two of the signs shown in full later: an Indian airport notice that bans "eating carpet" and a bubble-tea banner with a very unfortunate last line.
Why so many signs end up mistranslated
English has a name for this kind of writing. "Engrish" began as a joke about Japanese speakers mixing up the English l and r sounds, but it is now used for any garbled English written by non-native speakers. "Chinglish" is the Chinese-flavoured version. Both terms are informal and a little cheeky, so it is fair to remember that the people behind these signs were trying to help visitors in a language that is not their own.
Translators and linguists point to the same handful of causes again and again:
- Word-for-word translation. A sign is translated one character or word at a time, without checking which of several meanings is intended.
- Raw machine translation. Software output goes straight onto the sign with no human proofreading.
- Bad dictionaries. The linguist Victor Mair found that a popular 2002 Chinese-English dictionary rendered every instance of one common character as a crude swear word, which is why that word turns up on so many shop signs.
- No native reader. Nobody who speaks the target language sees the text before it goes up.
In some countries English is also used decoratively, on packaging and clothing, to look modern rather than to be read. When nobody expects a native speaker to read it closely, accuracy matters less, and the results can be spectacular.
Airports, parks and public notices
This stand at an Indian airport is run by the Airports Authority of India. The Hindi line above it asks people not to eat on the floor, but the word for "floor" was apparently swapped for "carpet" and the word for "food" turned into a verb, so the English bans passengers from eating the carpet itself.
Strictly speaking, this park sign is not a translation at all. It is a punctuation problem: without a line break, comma or colon after "People are eating children in this area", the first two lines read as a horror story rather than a warning that families picnic nearby.
A road-safety board from the Regional Transport Authority in Sonepat, in the Indian state of Haryana, has its subject and object back to front. The point it wanted to make is the familiar one that most crashes are caused by people, through human error, rather than people being "caused by accidents".
This China Eastern Airlines sign is one of the best-documented Chinglish errors. The Chinese asks passengers to wait behind the one-metre line, but 米线 can be read either as "metre line" or as mixian, a type of rice-flour noodle, and the translation chose the noodle.
The Chinese words 无障碍 simply mean "barrier-free" or "accessible". The English chosen here uses a term most disabled people find offensive, which shows why accessibility signs in particular should be checked by a native speaker; "Accessible" is the standard international wording.
The Chinese 施工進行中 means "construction in progress". The verb for carrying out building work can also be rendered as "execute", which is how a wet-floor stand ends up announcing an execution.
Another building-works notice, this time 施工中 不准使用, "under construction, do not use". "Erection" is a real word for putting up a structure, but in everyday English it has a very different meaning, and the crossed-out stick figure does not help.
Menus where dinner took a wrong turn
The character 炸 (zhà) means both "to deep-fry" and "to explode". A dish of crisp-fried large intestine, a common item on Chinese menus, therefore became something that "explodes the large intestine".
"Urinate beef ball rice noodles" is, surprisingly, a faithful translation. 撒尿牛丸, literally "pissing beef balls", was popularised by Stephen Chow's 1996 Hong Kong comedy The God of Cookery, in which a juicy beef ball is combined with "pissing shrimp"; the name stuck in real restaurants, juice squirt and all.
天婦羅 is the Chinese and Japanese way of writing tempura, the light Japanese batter. Somewhere along the way "tempura" became "temporal", leaving a tray of fried shrimp that sounds as though it might not last.
The noodle dish here uses saozi, a topping of minced meat, served with hele noodles. The trouble is that the character 臊 also has a second reading, sāo, which describes the smell of urine, and the translation picked that one.
辣婆婆 really does mean something like "spicy granny", so this one is less a mistake than a literal translation of a playful name. Chinese cooking has a famous precedent: mapo tofu is named after a pockmarked old woman, Chen Mapo, whose Chengdu eatery made the dish famous in the nineteenth century.
This menu shows several traps at once. 牛仔 can mean "calf" or "cowboy", so diced beef becomes "cowboy granule"; a tomato and fatty-beef noodle dish turns into "the tomato is a fat fish"; and "boiling fish frog jump" is a fair attempt at a dish name that is a pun even in Chinese.
On this Russian menu the cafe abbreviated "assorted ice cream", мороженое в ассортименте, to "мороженое в асс." and then translated the abbreviation letter for letter. The result needs no further explanation, while the line below it, сливки взбитые, is simply whipped cream.
A seafood counter offering "fresh crap" at $7.99 a pound almost certainly meant carp, and the fish in the tank below supports that reading. One dropped letter is all it takes; spell-checkers will not catch it, because "crap" is a real word.
Shops, packaging and products
This shop label wanted to say that staff will help customers try the products, so please ask rather than handling them yourself. Rendered word for word, "don't touch yourself" turns a polite request into something else entirely.
This bright packet of instant ramen carries the English name "Soup for Sluts" over a line of Japanese that simply praises the flavour. Its origin is unconfirmed; it is widely shared as a translation fail, but it may also be a novelty product designed to be photographed.
"I'm bubble tea" is a sweet start. The tapioca pearls in bubble tea are often called "balls" or "boba", which explains how a cheerful three-panel banner ended with a line no English-speaking marketer would ever have approved.
This Taiwanese store's Chinese name, 生鮮超市, means a supermarket selling fresh produce. The English "Very Suspicious Supermarket" seems to have come from a character that sounds like "fresh" but means "suspect", although nobody has explained exactly how the slip happened.
No source language is visible on this restaurant board, so it may be a deliberate joke rather than a translation error. Either way it promises something no diner was worried about, which is exactly what makes it memorable.
"Shoplifters will be prosecuted" is a stock phrase, and one wrong word changes the threat dramatically. This is a typing or spell-check slip rather than a translation, a reminder that native speakers make sign mistakes too.
The Chinese 灭火瓶 means a fire-extinguishing bottle, a fire extinguisher. Labelling it "hand grenade" is perhaps the most alarming way to describe a piece of safety equipment, and a good reason to translate safety signs with extra care.
A "manicure set" containing pliers, a screwdriver and a box cutter is hard to explain as a single wrong word. It is more likely that a generic English label was reused on the wrong product, a common shortcut with cheap packaging.
This canvas purse prints a garbled version of the proverb "Behind every successful man there is a woman". Each word seems to have been translated separately, which is how "successful" became "counseling" and a stray "Joseph" wandered in at the end.
Hotels, restrooms and the truly baffling
The Japanese on this restroom sign politely thanks people for keeping the toilet clean. The English "Please urinate with precision and elegance" is not a literal translation, but it may be the most charming sign in the collection, and it gets the message across.
A Chinese public-toilet poster lists good habits, each followed by the slogan 文明你最美, roughly "being civilised makes you beautiful". The second line was meant to ask men to aim into the urinal; the character 池 can mean basin or pool, which explains "urinating into the pool".
This table card comes from the Erbil International Hotel in Iraqi Kurdistan. What it was meant to say is unclear; one plausible guess is that "Paul" is a transliteration of "pool", but the card stands as a mystery that has puzzled guests and internet readers alike.
The vest reads 搜爆犬, a "search-explosives dog", in other words a bomb-sniffing dog. "Explosive dog" drops the key verb, and the photo became famous when it was shared on Twitter in September 2016 with the reply "Would still pet".
大操厅 most likely means a large hall for exercise or assembly. The character 操 (cāo), meaning to drill or exercise, is also a vulgar slang word, and dictionaries or translation tools that list only the slang sense produce signs like this one.
This is not an accidental translation at all. The words on the Pikachu shirt come from a well-known internet joke that parodies the slogans written on soldiers' helmets during the Vietnam War, and they were printed on bootleg and novelty clothing on purpose.
How to avoid a sign like these
Big cities have learned these lessons the hard way. After Beijing was chosen in 2001 to host the 2008 Olympics, its tourism bureau set up a hotline for reporting bad English signs, and in 2007 a city programme said it had produced more than 4,600 standard translations to replace them. Shanghai corrected over 10,000 public signs before Expo 2010, and in December 2017 China introduced a national standard for English on public signs.
For a small business the fixes are simpler:
- Use machine translation only as a first draft, then ask a native speaker or professional to read it.
- Translate the meaning, not the words: "Accessible toilet", not a literal rendering of each character.
- Keep it short. A clear pictogram plus two or three plain words beats a long sentence.
- Check safety, medical and accessibility signs with extra care, because a mistake there is not just funny.
- If unsure, show the final text to a few visitors who speak the language.
The photos above are funny because we can usually work out what the sign wanted to say, and the joke is on the wording, not the people who wrote it. Most travellers would rather read a slightly odd sign in their own language than none at all.
Sources: Wikipedia: Chinglish; Wikipedia: Engrish; Wikipedia: The God of Cookery; Wikipedia: Mapo tofu; Engrish.com; photos collected from Reddit r/engrish.
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