Archive for 'China'

This is what greeted me at the entrance of the supermarket:

5+ A DAY!

How about that for promoting fresh produce?

FRUIT ON DISPLAY

 This fruit carousel also had grower information on display.

Signage was a mixture of pre-printed and handwritten.

LYCHEE DISPLAY

  Going fishing supermarket style!

CUSTOMER CHOOSES, STAFF MEMBER CATCHES

In these supermarkets, fish on ice is considered 2nd grade product.

Some errors of translation are just that – errors – and the translation effort was done with the best of intentions in the first place.

Some, not so much:

Support the Team

Being of German origin, I do know some soccer teams and Borussia I definitely know about.  So I had to look twice at this long distance supporter to realise that the shirt was a clever rip off.  Admittedly the colour was a big giveaway, but can you see the other, careful error?

That is a “P”, not the “D” that it should be for Dortmund.

A carefully designed, deliberate mistake to get around copyright laws; no good intentions here.  Not the first example of such practices and far from the last – as Zespri well knows.

But what is it?

Jackfruit is what it is...

Jackfruit, for the information junkies out there, is the national fruit of Bangladesh, has been cultivated for over 6,000 years and is the largest tree fruit (a single fruit can weigh in at up to 36kg!).

Slice and dice your jackfruit

During my time in Beijing, I was able to visit the Forbidden City.   It is an impressive, massive place; very busy with many tourists from all over China as well as the world.

The Forbidden City

You just can't get away from American Express...

3 gold pagodas

gold artifacts

 

Just imagine if Cortez, Pizarro and the Conquistadores had gotten here…

I have two  team members who is fluent in Mandarin and English, both written and spoken, another fluent in Arabic, two fluent in Afrikaans and yet another whose first language is Italian.  Those who know me, know my languages are German and English.  Between us, we can nut out most things.

However, some concepts will always be hard to translate, and the English language is notorious for getting around this by simply absorbing the foreign word into its lexicon.  Words like verandah and mana, for example.

Some translation efforts can be unintentionally funny – there is even a whole website devoted to examples spotted around the world.  Here are two I came across in my recent travels:

CHICKEN

PRAWNS