Tatto For You

from: John R. to: tiangotlost@gmail.com date: Sat, Jun 21, 2014 at 5:03 PM subject: Tattoo Submission Tian, Been trying to get my brother to submit this for awhile and he finally gave me the go ahead. It is supposed to say "pure man" but one time someone told him it meant more properly something like 10/9ths Rice Man...and that maybe that was a colloquial expression for purity. Sounds fishy! Can you help us out please? Thank you! 粋男 = "chic man"? There is a Japanese variety show called 粋男流儀 , hosted by Peter Frankl and 矢吹春奈 (Yabuki Haruna).

Shameless Self Promotion: This humble little blog was mentioned in The Economist : http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/06/computer-aided-translation Computer-aided translation Johnson: Rise of the machine translatorsJun 4th 2014, 16:45 by R.L.G. | DUBLIN THOSE passingly familiar with machine translation (MT) may well have reacted in the following ways at some point. “Great!” would be one such, on plugging something into the best-known public and free version, Google Translate, and watching the translation appear milliseconds later. “Wait a second…” might be the next, from those who know both languages. Google Translate, like all MT systems, can make mistakes, from the subtle to the the hilarious. The internet is filled ( here for example) with signs badly machine translated from Chinese into English. What monolingual English-speakers don't realise is just how many funny mistakes get made in translating the other way. Take, for example, the Occupy Wall Street protester in ...

from: Meredith P. to: tiangotlost@gmail.com date: Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 8:37 PM subject: Possibly worst Japanese tattoo ever Seriously, I cannot think of anything worse. Reddit discussion: http://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/27vikg/possibly_the_worst_japanese_tattoo_i_have_ever/ According to Reddit discussion thread, the tattoo was intended to be: "I stand for many yet walk alone." However, it is a pretty horrendous translation fail. My fellow linguaphile,  Alan Siegrist adds,  The peculiar thing is that the characters are all correctly and properly written in a nice font, but it is completely gibberish in meaning. Could it possibly have been machine-translated into Japanese from English or some other language and the MT output tattooed as-is onto the unsuspecting tattooee’s foot? You would think that maybe the untranslated lowercase letter “i” in the supposedly Japanese MT output would have clued someone in to the fact that the MT had failed, leaving just gibberish. It re...

A reader of Hanzi Smatter recently sent in a poster of American television show, Arrow , where the lead character, Oliver Queen, has four Chinese characters tattooed on his abdomen. The characters are 鼠姜姚猪 , which literally translate as "rat/rodent", "ginger", "handsome/good-looking", and "pig/swine". There are speculations on what the significance of this tattooed phrase, since I have never watched the series, I can only rely on interviews posted on YouTube.

from:   Natalie O. to:   Tian date:   Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 11:47 AM subject: Re: Help read my tattoo I got this about 10 years ago and am curious to know what it actually says. Thanks for your help. 滾蛋 = get out of here! / beat it!

As per usual I begin with an apology - and this the most earnest of those so far: so very sorry for the abruptness and the length (!) of my silence. I am in fact, still alive, still working, and most significantly, preparing for fatherhood. I do suffer from chronic, low level depression which most often presents itself as a strong desire to be left alone and excessive computer gaming :\ ... yet the main reason for the sudden stop was more particularly two things: 1/ fear, as I approach the moment/scene in ECONOMOUS that motivated me to start his story in the first place; & 2/ realising that I had no idea who Miss Swift actually is (since *-SPOILERS AHEAD!-* I want to make her a main character) and not being able to proceed without her being better realised. Well, happy day \o/, thanks to my writers' group of Michael Hawke, Ben Morton & Rikki Lambert, I have a much clearer sense of her now (and quite different she is from how I have penned her so far) so proceeding can begin...