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This unintentionally goofy mistranslation appears on a toy package in a Chinese dollar store. Unfortunately, the original photographer is unknown. -via Dangerous Minds
Sam Kean wrote a book about the periodic table of elements called The Disappearing Spoon. When the Chinese edition came out, he was surprised by the cover art, which included some element icons that were sexually suggestive and others that didn’t make any sense whatsoever. Only a portion of the cover is shown here. He contacted the jacket designer, Bianco Tsai, who explained the thinking behind her choices for the illustration.
In the end, Tsai said, “I have to built a bridge to connect our culture to your book!” I still think her cover looks sharp, and if Tsai says that it bridges my book to Chinese culture, I believe her. If so, though, it’s a one-way bridge. Trying to decipher the cover still leads to an uncanny feeling for me. Something I’d labored over for years, and written and rewritten until I’d practically memorized it, had became alien. It’s what those poor characters in neurologist Oliver Sacks’ books must feel like when they suddenly have a stroke or something and can’t recognize their own faces in the mirror. It was yet another reminder that although the periodic table is universal, people’s reactions to it are anything but.
Read the reasons behind the element icons and see if they make sense to you, at Slate. Link -via Buzzfeed
When Hollywood movies are renamed for overseas audiences, the results can be literal or inexplicable, and sometimes remarkably apt. For example, Knocked Up was released in China as One Night Big Belly, which makes perfect sense. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me became Austin Powers: The Spy Who Behaved Very Nicely Around Me in Malaysia, which sounds like a scheme to get past censors. But what do you make of Dragnet, which was shown in Germany as Floppy Coppers Don’t Bite? Link -via Gorilla Mask
American movies are often re-titled for foreign audiences. In this quiz, you’ll be given a foreign title of a US movie, translated into English. Can you guess what movie it was in the US? It’s a multiple-choice question, so it shouldn’t be too hard. After all, I haven’t even seen the vast majority of these movies, yet I scored 27 out of 30 by taking time to think about each question. Bonus: if you take the quiz again, the questions will be different. Link -via mental_floss
Archaeologists find them; linguists try to read them, but even after years of study, some writings are indecipherable. Some are from unknown languages, others were written in code. All are baffling. An example is the Rohonc Codex.
This most peculiar script is written from right to left, and seems to mix up runes, straight and rounded characters in the style of Old Hungarian – but it defies all attempts at translation. This bamboozling manuscript was given to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences by Count Battyany in 1852, and is is believed to have been written in medieval times. Appearing to be hand-scripted, and illustrated with crude black and white sketches, the writing is simply not decipherable in any way. However, code-breakers have managed to at least ascertain that the language involved consists of 42 letters and over 200 different symbols, some non-alphabetic, as well as other symbols which see only occasional use.
The Rohonc Codex is just one of seven untranslated manuscripts in this list at Environmental Graffiti. Link -via the Presurfer
How cool is this? We don’t post a lot of iPhone apps, because so many people do not have iPhones (myself for one). However, this is the first app I’ve seen that actually makes me want an iPhone (not that I’m going to buy one). The Word Lens app is a free download, but the dictionaries are $5 each. So far, English to Spanish and Spanish to English are the only dictionaries available. It works with short phrases like signs, not with large blocks of text, like books. Link -via reddit
Adding subtitles is work best left done to professionals. Professionals usually work only with languages they actually speak and read. Urlesque has a collection of screen captures featuring subtitles so bad they deserve to be kept for posterity. Some are TV feeds, which have to be done in an instant, but most are bootlegged movies transcribed by ear, or possibly by alchemy. Link
NEC is developing a gadget that will translate spoken words into text displayed on a user’s eyes:
The prototype device called a “Tele Scouter” is a glasses type display that translates the foreign language being spoken by a partner and projects the translation onto a tiny retinal display.
The device mounted on an eyeglass frame consists of the retinal display, front-mounted camera and microphone, but doesn’t perform the translation itself. Rather the microphone picks up the conversation and transmits it to a portable computer worn on the user’s waist. This computer in turn transmits the information to a remote server, which is responsible for carrying out the heavy processing of converting the speech to text, translating it and sending it back to the wearable parts of the system to be displayed on the retinal display.
The 1973 Disney animated film Robin Hood has been translated into languages all over the world, which has to be a difficult job because so much of the story is told through songs. Andy Baio at Waxy has collected over a dozen translations of the opening song “Oo De Lally” for your listening pleasure. The singers are quite talented! My favorite is the Arabic version. Link -via mental_floss
Sometimes there are words that cannot be translated into another language without losing some of its meaning. According to the BBC and 1,000 linguists, the most difficult word to translate is "ilunga". A word in the Tshiluba language, which is spoken in south-east Congo. "Ilunga", when attempted to translate into English means "a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time".
In second place was shlimazl which is Yiddish for “a chronically unlucky person”.
Third was Naa, used in the Kansai area of Japan to emphasise statements or agree with someone.
Although the definitions seem fairly precise, the problem is trying to convey the local references associated with such words, says Jurga Zilinskiene, head of Today Translations, which carried out the survey.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by lilrawker.
If Little Green Men are one day discovered they’re certainly not going to speak fluent English. Scientists fear this may make any alien contact impossible to understand and could create some very awkward circumstances for the rest of us.
Leeds Metropolitian University’s Dr. John Elliott has devised software he believes will decipher the structure of any alien’s language which would be the first step in understanding what the potential invader of Earth may be saying, declaring or demanding. Elliott’s program is
designed to compare an alien language to a database of 60 different known languages in the world and search for ones that have similar structure.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by whitespace.
