Lost in Translation

I work for a company that manufactures and imports seasonal items that are then sold to retailers here in the US. We have an office in Taiwan and another office and a factory in China. We have daily email correspondence with both offices and while the English of the folks on the other end is very good, much better than I would ever do trying to communicate in Putonghua (yes, I realize how pretentious it is to use the official name instead of just “Chinese”); there are still some amusing translational missteps that occur.

Most of the time it is because of an alternate wording of a common phrase. One such incident occurred when it had come to the time of year when the customer was deciding what to buy for the next season. The factory obviously was becoming impatient when they sent over this line in the email: “please advise what color customer will decide finally on earth.” Sometimes, however, the final design of a product is left up to us, and we try many different options to decide which is the best to show the customer. During one of these design periods the factory inquired if they “could select and select till we are satisfactory?” It’s not all business, though, especially around holiday time warm pleasantries are exchanged. For example, last Christmas the email finished with a very nice salutation: “The Christmas is coming, Merry Christmas!”

Other times, humor comes not from the usage, but because an archaic term is used instead of a more standard one. I suppose their Chinese-to-English dictionary is a bit out of date since once they came up with: “please give us evincive information.” The usage here is actually correct, but evincive hasn’t been used much since the early 1900's.

Sometimes there isn’t any real logical reason for the misstep and what comes back is just funny. We asked the factory once to provide us with official scientific data on what would happen if a particular grill cover we were working on was left out in the sun. Product testing is a very common practice and all the retailers require it, so many times we like to do this ourselves in order to present the customer with results right from the start. Well, this time our scientific report came in and revealed the final result of the testing, nicely typed on official letterhead, of what would happen if the cover was left out in the sun. The page simply read: “it smell stink”.

My all time favorite example, however, came in an email one morning. We had been waiting on pricing information for an item and were expecting it that day. We knew we would have to wait a little longer, though, once we received this explanation: “the man who is in charge of quotation is overdrink this afternoon.” This is not only funny on several levels, but also gives some insight into Chinese linguistics. The word for “drunk” in Chinese is the character for “over” and the character for “drink”. More than this, though, I think the reason this is my favorite is because of how much I can identify with the guy. There have certainly been days where I (and I’m sure most of you who have worked in an office could agree) would have liked nothing more than to take off after lunch to go out and get good and overdrink. It’s nice to know that despite the language difference we still have a good bit in common with our friends in the Far East.