Translation Goes Nuts

With the popularity of learning Chinese worldwide nowadays, more and more Americans are fond of finding unique and attractive Chinese names for themselves. Don’t lie to you, most American people I knew give themselves fairly off-the-wall Chinese names, and worse yet, they are extraordinarily proud of those names. Hilarious Chinese names American choose An American guy who has lived in China for several years and got his Chinese driver license (which is even difficult to get for Chinese people) chose a Chinese name ‘ 好厉害 ’ for himself. ‘ 好厉害 ’ (hao li hai) means awesome, amazing or wonderful in English. It is truly ‘Awesome’ for an American to obtain a Chinese driver license, but it is so uncommon to choose such a name in both America and China (and on the earth). My friend Andrew got a Chinese name ‘ 安卓 ’, which means ‘Android’, since the Chinese pronunciation of 安卓 (an zhuo)  is very similar to English pronunciation of Andrew. We gave our American boss Adam Power...

I admit that the quality of machine translation like Google Translation and Facebook Translation has improved tremendously in recent years, some scientists even claim that algorithms are almost as good at translation as humans. However, there are still some confusing and awkward machine translation results causing outbursts of unstoppable laughter. Some of them even make me feel creep… A dinner menu on Sean Hoare Cruise: English Bacon ( 英式 烟肉 )   英 语 培根 -which means ‘English language bacon’. Cool! Is a foreigner supposed to speak English after having this magic bacon? Regular Milk （全脂牛奶） 规则牛 奶 -which means normal or uniform milk which is in a definite pattern like some chemical elements. Is there irregular milk? Green Spilt Pea Soup （ 绿豆汤 ） 绿 分裂豌豆 汤 -which means this pea soup got schizophrenia! An advertisement for donkey rides in Thailand: Would you like to ride on your own ass? ( 您想 单 独 骑 一 头 毛 驴吗 ) 您想 骑自己的屁股吗 ? -which means ‘would you like to ri...