Do you need a laugh today? Go to Engrish.com.
My wife’s cousin’s husband (almost sounds like we are hillbillies, eh?) retired at an early age and now seems to spend all of his free time on the Internet.
This means that my wife gets tons of email from him — covering everything from conspiracy theories (No, I do not believe that the World Trade Center was bombed by the U.S. government.) to humorous videos (including my favorite: Evil Baby Eye).
Yesterday he sent to her several photos from the website Engrish.com, and every photo made us laugh!
The site accepts photos taken by readers who have spotted bad English on signs, labels, T-shirts, and other products from non-native-English-speaking countries.
Besides the humor — and there is a LOT of humor at Engrish.com — what I enjoy about the website is trying to understand how the translations into English became so mangled and twisted.
Some bad-but-humorous translations seem to be based on a non-native-English speaker hearing an English word enunciated poorly and converting it into writing such that the written form is an English word but not the same one.
For example, the photographed sign shown here refers to “groups” as “grubs”. If you squint your eyes and muffle your ears while reading and saying it aloud, you can see and hear how “groups” became “grubs”.
Other mangled translations seem to fall into categories such as these:
- omitting words (“Perfect Eye Remover”);
- choosing the wrong word (“The Yokohama Climax Hill”); and,
- translations that simply make you say, “Huh?!” (“Chocolate Puke”).
Beyond the photos, what makes Engrish.com especially funny is the comments from the site’s readers.
Many people say that dissection of a joke takes all the fun out of the joke, but those who become good at dissecting jokes become good at creating new ones.
I believe that this principle applies to mistranslations, too, and I could imagine that someone could write a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation on how translations go askew from one language to another.
Anyway, even if you are not interested in the mechanics of how words get mistranslated but you enjoy mistranslations for their humor alone, then you will enjoy Engrish.com.