Hanzi Smatter 一知半解

We have moved to hanzismatter.blogspot.com

2010-04-11T20:06:00.003-07:00

Hello everyone,

We have moved to a new location:

http://hanzismatter.blogspot.com

This is because Blogger will no longer support FTP publishing after May, 1st, 2010. I don't have the time to move everything over. All old entries will still be available here at www.hanzismatter.com.

See you there,

Tian

Henna tattoos at Six Flags

2010-03-18T09:34:00.001-07:00

from: DeKalb D.
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 3:24 PM
subject: Henna tattoos at Six Flags

Hi Tian :)

I was walking through Six Flags over Georgia today and came across this in a henna tattoo booth.

What really confuses me is that while most of the descriptions are accurate, ALL of them are backwards except one - 愛 is labeled as "lovers" but 愛 backwards is labeled as "love"!

First thing I thought of was of sending it to Hanzi Smatter and letting the world see it :)

DeKalb :)

Camilo E.

2010-02-27T14:31:00.005-07:00

from: Camilo E.
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 2:28 PM
subject: my tattoo

Hi,

My name is camilo and i write from Venezuela, i just want to know if you can help me to translate my tattoo because i think that is not what i want for my skin jajaja. I went to a tattoo store and i look the chinese and japanese letters that they offer. I ask to the guy if i can tattoo my name initials and he say YES!!!!.

Well, i send a photo of my tattoo to see if you can translate for my.

I appreciate your help.

Best regards.

CE

Gibberish font strikes again.

iPhone app: Chinese Alphabet

2009-12-26T23:10:00.003-07:00

Good Characters, Inc. (oh, the irony) has launched a new application for Apple iPhones called "Chinese Alphabet".

http://goodcharacters.com/blog/blog.php?id=110

The application uses a set of random Chinese characters to correspond with 26 letters in English alphabet. The company claims this will "add mystery to your writing".

At least they are smart enough to put up this disclaimer at bottom of the page:

"The translation provided by Chinese Alphabet is intended for personal use and entertainment only. Not recommended for tattoo artists to use this to tattoo their clients, iPhone app developers to localize Chinese apps, CIA agents to communicate national secrets, or security professionals to encrypt passwords."

Split

2009-12-13T23:32:00.003-07:00

http://www.bme.com/tattoo/A91210/high/jyc7-tribals-natural.jpg

At firs, it looks like pure gibberish - mixed Japanese and Chinese characters:

厉カネ羊

But looking more carefully, perhaps the idiot started with these characters:

励祥

But then he decided to switch from horizontal to vertical writing, and then split up the characters at the wrong places, making two characters into four.

Hopeless!

By the way, what does 励祥 mean anyway?

"Me Pervert"

2009-12-09T21:23:00.003-07:00

from: Herouth M.
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 1:43 AM
subject: [Fwd: Emailing: P1230294.JPG]

Hi. I'm from Israel. Love your blog.

The story goes like this: I study Japanese for several years now, and I can read about 1400 kanji more or less. One day, my co-worker approaches me with his cellphone. "Can you tell me what this says?" he asks me, showing me a photo of a piece of fabric carrying the kanji 私変態. I take a look, and reply "It's not grammatical, but it basically says "I'm a pervert".

"What?!"

"'I'm a pervert'. The first character means 'I', the other two mean 'pervert'", where did you get that from, anyway?

"It's on my 1.5 years old daughter's shirt!"

After LOLing for about 15 minutes straight, I kind of demanded that he get me a photo of the complete shirt so I can send it to Hanzi Smatter. And here is the shirt, complete with the cute, luckless 1.5 years old "hentai" herself.

I mean, yes, I have seen intentionally-made "hentai" shirts around the web (and on Hanzi Smatter). Adults buy them and wear them for the laughs. But who in his right mind would put this on a toddler's shirt, and sell it in a children's clothing store rather than a joke shop? I can't imagine.

Yes, I suppose it *could* mean "metamorphosis", but really, outside scientific contexts, it's almost always means "pervert". Or am I wrong?

Cheers,
Herouth

Cute kid, though. The "bunny" or whatever kind of cute animal that is also on the shirt is a nice touch. We have obviously uncovered a diabolical plot to "pervert" innocent youth with inappropriate hanzi!

By the way, the T-shirt would be cuter and better if it was grammatically correct, like:

私、変態なんです。[I ... am a pervert.]

私、変態かも…[I might be a pervert...]

As it is, it sounds more like Tarzan-speak: "me - pervert." You kind of expect "you - Jane" next.

OSUKE Nutritional Supplement

2009-11-29T18:36:00.002-07:00

Remember Kinoki, the detox footpad, turned out to be a ripoff?

Alan and I present you, Osuke nutritional supplement:

For those who are interested, the product's laughable claims are detailed at its website.

However, we would like to point the readers to the five characters below OSUKE:

行迎友先天

The phrase has virtually no meaning in either Chinese or Japanese. But, using our handy-dandy Decoder Card for Gibberish English-Chinese Tattoo font, guess what 行迎友先天 corresponds?

OSUKE

After reading the product's name is complete gibberish, would anyone pay US$37.95 for a bottle of this supplement?

Another set of Gibberish English-Chinese Font

2009-11-19T21:22:00.005-07:00

Alan and I have discovered another set of gibberish English-Chinese font that many people are getting tattooed with. We have compiled this handy-dandy decoder card for those who want to be entertained deciphering gibberish tattoos:

DecoderCard.pdf

Using decoder card, this tattoo below is "SABINA", in gibberish of course:

http://www.bme.com/tattoo/A91117/high/jph9-untitled-image.jpg

Update: Nov. 22, 2009 - Alan has created an updated version of Decoder Card:

DecoderCard_v2.pdf

CSI NY / "It Happened to Me"

2009-11-05T09:48:00.006-07:00

In last night's episode of CSI NY titled "It Happened to Me", there was one scene where detectives were trying to figure out what killed their victims. At first, they thought the cause was these illegally imported insecticide chalk from China found in victim's apartment.

(Spoiler alert: No, it was not the insecticide chalk. Victim mismanaged killer's investment fund and lost all his money. Killer's wife had access to chemical from her work, and killer dumped it into victim's orange juice.)

One would assume three lines of Chinese text on the packaging below "kills cockroach and ants effectively. keep away from baby and old man" are the same information in Chinese.

That is not true. Matter of fact, they are just gibberish.

If one would look closely, the first line of text and third line are identical. Last three characters in second line are repeat of first three.

So what do they mean?

Line 1 and 3 are:

精神和奠酒酒吧

精神和奠酒 loosely translates as "spirit and libation" and 酒吧 is "bar".

Line 2 is:

新鮮的肉新鮮的

新鮮的肉 is "fresh meat" and 新鮮的 is "fresh".

What do "fresh meat" and "bar of spirit and libation" got to do with insecticide chalk?

Can everyone say CSI NY show prop fail?

"William Beloved Son"

2009-10-24T11:20:00.002-07:00

from: Haribo S.
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 7:50 AM
subject: Submission

Hi there.

One of my friends posted this on Facebook and claims it says "william beloved son", is this accurate?
http://imgur.com/iU0i7.jpg
Thanks :) love the blog

This is another case of Chinese-Japanese mismatch.

威廉 is Chinese phonetic transliteration of "William", however 愛息 is translated as "love [to] rest" when read as Chinese.

While Japanese for "William" is ウィリアム and 愛息 (あいそく) is interpreted as "beloved son/cute boy".

Khaled 'Kdog' Hablas

2009-10-12T20:56:00.002-07:00

from: Anonymous
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 10:02 PM
subject: Another "Asian font" tattoo

Hi there,

Some guy in Facebook is showing off his tattoo.

As an avid reader of your site, I know that this tattoo is his name ‘K-H-A-L-E-D’ in the ridiculous ‘Asian font’.

I thought you might like to see it.

"Stupid American"

2009-09-27T15:34:00.004-07:00

from: trellz
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 12:13 PM
subject: tatoo submission

Should say stupid American, or stupid foreign person.

美国人 is Chinese for "American".

However 阿呆 (or あほ) is a localize dialect for "fool, jackass" in Japan's Kansai region. Where most Japanese would use 馬鹿 as "stupid". Also, 米囯人 is Japanese for "American".

愚蠢 is correct Chinese for "stupid".

Wired Magazine: 17.10

2009-09-27T15:04:00.004-07:00

In the latest issue of Wired magazine, there was a piece titled "10 Best Things We'll Say to Our Grandkids".

According to the magazine, English translation for #6 is:

"English used to be the dominant language. Crazy, huh?"

Dr. Mair and I both noticed the printed Chinese is not correct.

统治语言 (dominate language), is two English phrases spliced together with an odd sense of colonialism. 官方語言 (official language) or 國際語言 (international language) would be better fitting.

疯狂 does not have the same contextual meaning as "crazy", rather "frenzied, unbridled; insane". In this case, a better phrase would be "傻不傻", or "isn't that silly?"

Perhaps this is a nod to Firefly, where mixture of Chinese Mandarin phrases were added into the show's dialogue.

Related: http://www.tian.cc/2007/08/wired-magazine-does-anyone-here-speak.html

M. A. D. by Marquis Antoine Daniels

2009-09-12T12:49:00.003-07:00

from: Victor H. Mair
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com,
date: Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 12:00 PM
subject: tattoo

Hi Tian,

Perhaps you can post this for me on HANZISMATTER.

Victor

======

The attached picture, sent to me by Jonathan Smith, shows a basketball player's "Chinese" tattoos. They read 康女宀 from top to bottom: KANG1 ("peace, vigor") NÜ3 ("woman") MIAN2 ("shelter, thatch"). Yet the proud owner claims that they are "my initials in Chinese, M.A.D."

My best guess as to how this may have happened is that the basketball player approached a tattooist who was minimally literate (or illiterate) in Chinese or English (or both) and showed him / her his initials, requesting the tattooist to "write them in Chinese symbols / characters / ideographs / hieroglyphs / pictographs / whatever." The initials may have been more or less ornately written, with the result that the tattooist came up with these three HANZI as his / her best representation of what he / she was seeing. For example, if you twist 女 around in different orientations, you can sort of see an "A" there. Ditto for the other two HANZI.

=======

victor

--

Victor H. Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature
Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
University of Pennsylvania

Semicolon on Her Back

2009-08-27T09:03:00.004-07:00

Peter has forward me this interesting story about a woman's tattoo experience.

"I have four Japanese symbols across my back, gleaned from a Japanese-English dictionary.

...

Yes, it would seem that in our haste, nobody took the semicolon from the dictionary entry out of the design and it now lives for eternity on my skin."

http://ittybiz.com/moral-of-the-story-topless-edition-with-photos/

Peter and I are shaking our heads regarding:

She is apparently more upset that there's a semicolon attached to her tattoo than by the fact that the tattoo itself is terribly done.

According to the tattoo's owner, Naomi Dunford, "It was supposed to say 'Mother Daughter Sister Wife'. Then wife was a pain in the ass and it was supposed to say 'beauty.' Who the hell knows what it means at this point?"

"Strength"

2009-08-16T17:59:00.004-07:00

from: Amilcar C.
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 8:08 AM

Hello,

Congrats for the cool blog.

A colleague has this tattoo done a couple of years ago and she was told it is suppose to mean “strength”.

Does it really mean that or anything else at all?

Thanks,

Amilcar C.

小畜 originated from the book of I Ching, meaning "small accumulating". Other variations include "the taming power of the small" and "small harvest". I don't see the connection between that and "strength", unless there is some kind of six degrees of ~~Kevin Bacon~~ I Ching I didn't know about.

"Julia"

2009-07-19T16:08:00.002-07:00

from: Kama
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 12:51 AM
subject: tattoo request

HanziSmatter site is amazing, great idea :) I love reading it. Chinese and Japanese characters looks great, but I still don't understand why people are tattooing their names in those languages, when they come from German, England or Poland, like me.

I guess they want to look cool, like my friend, who is 100% sure that he has "Julia" tattoo on his left hand.

Is he? Please, help me to translate it right (if it's not ok) because he is playing so smart, that would be a pleasure to prove him wrong ;)

Greetings from Poland,

Kama

珠丽娅 is an acceptable phonetic Chinese translation for Julia, however all characters were done mirrored.

Arrivals Sign at Stockholm Arlanda Airport

2009-07-19T15:57:00.002-07:00

from: Johan
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 9:41 PM
subject: Look at this Arrivals sign from Sweden

This is from Arlanda, Stockholm's international airport. They have a lot of these signs.

In Sweden, we pride ourselves on being way better than everybody else, by the way.

Johan, Sweden

It appears manufacturer of the sign did not have correct language and fonts pack installed. Instead of displaying 到達 (arrivals), the second character showed up as a rectangular box.

Help with translation - Faith, Hope and Love!

2009-07-13T10:32:00.003-07:00

from: Erik F.
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 9:32 AM
subject: Help with translation - Faith, Hope and Love!

Hey there!

My friend went to Turkey and got himself a tattoo in chinese or japanese. According to him it says "Faith, hope and love", but being the sceptical person I am, I thought I should send a picture to you to verify.

Does it really say that, or is this another case of "Prepaid Public Transportation Card"? (A part of me is hoping it is!)

Thanks for your time!

sincerely,

Erik

To one that is only familiar with Chinese or Japanese, this tattoo would be gibberish.

A quick look via Google Translator, I soon realized this is Chinese phonetic translation of Turkish, where Faith is "inanc" (伊南), Hope is "umut" (乌穆特), and Love is "ask" (阿士克).

The irony is with current situation in Xinjiang, China, were most ethnic Turks reside, Chinese and Turks are not on the best of terms.

Why would anyone stupid enough to get a Turkish phrase to be phonetically translated & tattooed in Chinese? It's like begging to be the Lucky Pierre in middle of an ethnic conflict.

"Looks Like a Rat"

2009-06-29T14:19:00.002-07:00

from: Taija N.
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 7:27 AM
subject: Tattoo

Hi!

I got a tattoo few years ago, when i was young and now I think I really didn't think it through. In tattoo there is cat (looks like a rat), so I started to wonder if the mark with the cat is really real. Does it say anything, is it false?

When I took it, it had meaning for me. Now I can't even remember that word what it was supposed to meant. I've checked all the possibles I know it could be, but haven't found that mark anywhere. I know, I've might been a stupid and I really don't understand how I forget it. Maybe it was that I didn't really understand what it meant and I just trusted the man who tattooed it.

I've read too much stories about people having stupid, even insulting or meaningless tattoos, so I just want to know if mine is real.

I guess, good thing is no one japanese or Chinese haven't ever stared it or laughed:D

Thank you very much in advance. I hope you can help me. I put the picture of tattoo for you.

Taija N.

It looks like 名 to me, what do you think?

Prepaid Public Transportation Card

2009-06-14T15:51:00.004-07:00

from: David L.
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 12:11 PM
subject: tattoo meaning

Hi, I'm called David Lopez.

I'm from Barcelona and I would like to know that it means a tattoo that I did to myself years ago.
I believe that it is Chinese and though I did it for aesthetics, now I am afraid of taking a meaning that I don't want.

My girlfriend and I would have a lot of interest to know the real meaning of my tattoo.

Thank you very much in advance. You will be of great help!

David

賈 means "buy/trade", 路 means "road, path", 卡 means "card".

賈路卡 sounds like a type of prepaid card that allows its owner to access public transportation. Typically it is called ~~乗車券~~ 定期券 (short for 定期乗車券) in Japan and 月票 in China.

Some readers suggested this could be translation of "Jeanluc", but that is not correct. Jeanluc is 吉魯克.

Massachusetts is red(-faced)

2009-06-09T15:05:00.005-07:00

Dr. Victor Mair, who wrote about the MaxPlanckForschung Cover Fiasco, points me to another piece in Language Log.

Dr. Mair says:

Reading the New Yorker on the train this morning, I was struck by the full-page ad following p. 17. When my eye drifted down the page a little, I had a bit of a shock.

I could immediately read the four Chinese characters on the arch over the entrance to Boston's Chinatown: 天下為公 ("All-under-Heaven Is a Commonwealth"), reading left to right. What left me disoriented is that each of the characters in the inscription was reversed. But then I realized that the entire inscription was a mirror image of what it should be. In other words, all four characters should be flipped over as a group and read from right to left.

As shown in the ad

Corrected (Note: classical Chinese is written right-to-left, hence the corrected image shows 公為下天 instead of 天下為公)

While not as embarrassing as the MaxPlanckForschung Cover Fiasco, I think that the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism might consider asking the advertising agency responsible for the ~~New Yorker~~ slip-up to give them a partial refund.

Update: This snafu is brought to you by Connelly Partners in Boston, MA. http://www.connellypartners.com/

Go to "our work", print, MOTT, it's the third one.

(Thanks to anonymous for the tip.)

"Survive"

2009-06-08T10:51:00.002-07:00

from: James H.
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 12:31 PM
subject: Translation of friend's tattoo

My friend Trev got this tattoo several years ago and he claims it means "survive". A Japanese woman in a sandwich shop gave us some reason to doubt this when she claimed it does not translate to that but she declined to translate it for us, She did say it was "nothing bad" though. As you can imagine I'm looking forward to mocking him if it is wrong. Any idea what it says?

I forwarded this to Alan Siegrist and he had this to say:

The tattoo reads 存続する [sonzoku suru] which means to "continue to exist."

This is not the same as the ordinary meaning of to "survive" in English which should be translated 生き残る [ikinokoru], when referring to a person surviving some sort of disaster like a plane crash, or surviving to old age.

The verb 存続する is not used to refer to people, but rather some sort of inanimate object or concept.

Perhaps 存続 might be used in the legal concept of "survivorship" so that might be how the mistake occurred.

I guess this is sort of "close but no cigar."

Saturday T-Shirt at Palmer Cash

2009-05-30T18:34:00.003-07:00

For those who want to be a complete douche-bag on a Saturday or any other days, perhaps a little karate, this is the shirt for you.

Who cares what those characters mean or even if they are correct. When you got this shirt on, you are so badass, even Chuck Norris would cover his nuts.

$21.97 at Palmer Cash by Vintage Vantage.

Superdry Co. UK

2009-05-30T18:10:00.003-07:00

www.superdry.co.uk

Alan forwarded me a link to a British apparel company called Superdry.

We are certainly not experts on the subject of brandnaming, but "Superdry" automatically equates to anti-perspirant or deodorant in the world of marketing (Back us up on this, Steve!).

The phrase 極度乾燥(しなさい) is very strange in Japanese, especially with しなさい in parentheses.

It seems like someone was told to translate “Superdry” into Japanese, but the translator could not decide whether it is supposed to be an adjective meaning “extremely dry” or a sentence meaning “dry extremely well” so they just fudged it and left the imperative form しなさい [shinasai] in parentheses, indicating their uncertainty.

It is just so random that this uncertain translation was immortalized in the logo without any subsequent editing.