Lost in Translation

So you’ve had a laugh at engrish.com . Here are a few of my own entries I spotted in a store. Guess the meanings

SKY KEEPER the game which missed is nothing

MAKE UP ONES MIND determining is courage. The way things stand, when that is not arranged or the time of determining comes

…or this scary one (If I see someone wearing it should I tell them?)

US MARINES 74-81 | JAPAN TOUR, GODS HELL HOLE | NEVER AGAIN

Now, go on, have a laugh on me. As my Japanese is becoming more conversational I’ve been learning about context… Yaru and Suru are both verbs meaning ‘to do’. I thought they could be used quite interchangeably, though Yaru was maybe less formal. Conjugate verbs by adding ‘tai’ and you can express ‘verb + want to’. I was on the street with Naomi mixing Japanese and English when I blurted out ‘YARITAI’. Naomi froze, stunned. I’d just tripped over the slang for ‘wanna f*ck?’

Or this one for gold. In a previous post I was describing ‘anko’ the red bean paste in Ichigo daifuku. I always get this confused. For those of you who didn’t pick it up, my blog read for a few days that I like eating ‘unko’. SHIT.

Lol.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 1:41 am and is filed under Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.