Friday, October 06, 2006

Ivan’s Site of the Week

This week’s winner is engrish.com, an inexhaustible supply of East Asian butchery wreaked upon our defenceless mother tongue. Orthographical errors, poor pronunciation, wholesale translation failures – all are grist to the mill of this site and its snap-happy contributors.

Low comedy? Perhaps. But then again, every example featured is genuine, so it’s not deliberately offensive. If nothing else, you’ll learn that the stereotypical Japanese confusion between “l” and “r” is well grounded in fact.

That said, it’s probably fair to say that we’d make a far worse fist of Mandarin or Japanese if we were ever moved to attempt them. There could be half a dozen equivalent sites in China and Japan having a field day at our expense and we’d never know it, ignorant cow-eyed gwai lo that we are.

But there we are. If they want to insult us in such a way that we care, they’ll just have to learn proper English, won’t they?


Japan’s export-driven economy misses a step…

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually, I find nothing is more fun than making fun of the English which foreign types attempt to speak. Indeed, that's why I married the German EMBLOS. Even though she has a Ph.D. in English, she still messes things up enough to give me the giggles.

True story: On her first weekend in Columbia, Missouri I invited her to accompany a friend and I on a canoe trip. She accepted.

On the way, we stopped at a Taco Bell in Rolla, Missouri. The EMBLOS approached the young server behind the counter and, using the best American idiom available, said:

"Please. Where is your restroom? I have to take a piss."

Cheers.

Pat said...

Randall: and I'm sure she speaks with an impeccable English accent which makes it even funnier. However - as you know- I can talk.
Ivan; love the Jap bloomer. Tee Hee! May have lost my Lancashire accent but not the bathroom humour.

Anonymous said...

Just found this:

"Be careful of the mental parts when dissemble the yo yo."

That's so wrong, it's right.

Ivan the Terrible said...

It's almost haiku-like in its obscurity, isn't it? Natural poets, the Japanese...

SafeTinspector said...

My favorite on that site was a black handbag with an illustration of a bulldog. Ringing the bulldog was the following phrase:
All objects on the Earth are made from powder.

Don't believe me?
Here

Anonymous said...

Well? Grind them long enough and they are.