Monday Fighter!
A common theme on Engrish sites (such as engrish.com or engrishfunny.com) is a food establishment with the sign “Fuck the vegetables”, or the like. I’ve seen it enough times so it’s not funny anymore, but finally had to research why “干” was so commonly mistranslated.
The Language Log page assauged my curiosity:
The problem here is that the word “gan” means both “to dry” and “to do,” and the latter meaning has come to mean “to fuck.” Unfortunately, the recent proliferation of Colloquial English dictionaries in China means people choose the vulgar translation way too often, on the grounds that it’s colloquial.
miscellaneous food is SO under-rated.
Reply to BlunderproneOooooo! I’m gonna tell on you! You used a bad word!
Reply to The MascotOh thats not literal? That explains why Im banned from most markets in China.
Reply to Pawn Shaman@Blunderprone: The miscellaneous food concept is pretty much how we learned how to make a lot of soups.
@Mascot: By all means, please let the website owner know. I’m sure he’ll reprimand the offender appropriately.
@Pawn Shaman: But not before they had enough surveillance videos to sell to XXXcite Media.
Reply to Donniewho the hell is writing these dictionaries and confusing “colloquial” with “obscenity”?
then again once I called my father-in-law a street term for “thug” in Spanish ’cause I didn’t know better.
**/end judgemental attitude. haha
Reply to annie