Some food festival or something? Bad English? Fights of the legislature?
I suppose I can understand the frustration at the laziness involved here. How difficult is it to get grammatically correct English in a translation these days?
Last weekend we went to the archeology museum or whatever in Bali and found more of the same. The English translations for the exhibits were extraordinarily bad. What gives? I could unfuck the Chinglish in about an hour for the entire museumâŚwhy donât they find someone else who can and pay them 1,000NT to do it?
LOL, theyâre not doing that again are they? Wasnât that the Taipei mayor who thought heâd invent his own romanization of çčéşľ (niu rou mian, beef noodle soup)? IIRC he got panned for that.
EDIT:
Found an explanation/justification: if foreigners learn suhi instead of rice with raw fish,m they can learn newroumian. âLet them try it one and they will rememberâ. disp.cc/b/163-2Avy
Not really ⌠than they start charging 1,000NT$ per bowl ⌠because they won a first prize ⌠and people line up around the block ⌠because itâs famousi âŚ
Well, locals Taiwanese people know English better than we native English speakers do, of course. Thatâs what the Taiwanese keep telling us, so it must be true.
If anyone would like to let the city know your thoughts about this, the contact person is Ms. Yè, who can be reached at 1999 ext. 6507, or at 02-2599-2875 ext. 214 or 220.
Theyâre trying a Chinese twist on English. In Chinese, characters can be used for meaning or as sound loans to transliterate foreign language words. For example, âlatteâ gets translated using the characters ćż and éľ, although sometimes ćżć. Trouble is, standard English spellings are almost always meaning only. We donât use standard spellings to represent the sounds of foreign language words. If you use the word ânew,â an English speaker would automatically think of the meaning ânew.â Ditto with ârow.â Oddly enough, the locals used a romanized Chinese spelling for âmian.â Of course, the unilingual visitors couldnât say that part correctly, as it is not an English word and the letter combination has no standard English pronunciation. If one were to be consistant with this silly sound loan transliteration, ânew row me anneâ would be easier for the purposes of fooling an English speaker into unwittingly making near-Chinese sounds. Of course, there is ZERO comprehension on the part of the foreigner, only somehwat approximate parroting of Chinese sounds is accomplished. If it is the intention of locals to get Chinese words used for Chinese food items (as in Japanese the transliterations for sushi etc), then they will have to be transliterated using a standard system such as hanyu pinyin and used consistently instead of translations. Of course, I agree with Llary, simple concepts like beef noddle soup are easier to translate as we have concepts for them in western cuisine.
Ho hum. What a waste of breath. Its aimed at Chinese and Japanese tourists. They donât give a flying crap what the stuff is called in English. It HAS an English name, which is quite cute enough. and the native speakers who DO care are so few and far between that theyâre not even a blip on the radar. Get used to it! Or better yet, just try calling the numbers Cranky so kindly provided. I did. What a fucking JOKE! Not really a joke of course â just absolutely bog-standard for this âinternational hub.â Well, I suppose the bint on the end of the phone DID say in her mangled English that theyâre âsoooo soorreeee! We take look! We take look!â THe only thing that was apparent is that she (the FOURTH individual I was put through to) had utterly NO interest in the topic and didnât even understand the CONCEPT that her bosses could somehow be wrong.
Taiwan touch your colon.
[quote=âsam_wongâ]Farangs always complaining about the pinyin. Maybe youâll be happier if they dispose of all pinyin.
Then you can learn Chinese![/quote]
No most people wonât bother. Personally I like Bo Pa Ma Fa. It took a little longer to learn but it seems more accurate.
[quote=âsam_wongâ]Farangs always complaining about the pinyin. Maybe youâll be happier if they dispose of all pinyin.
Then you can learn Chinese![/quote]
Weâre not complaining about the Pinyin. Pinyin is just fine. Weâre complaining about the ad-hoc systems that Taiwanese officials delight in inventing. There seems to be a new one at least once a month, so Chinese words are romanized using twenty different spellings depending on what day of the week it is. BoPoMoFo is equally silly, since there is a 1:1 equivalence between BoPoMoFo characters and Pinyin letters (or letter combinations).
Where Pinyin wins is that it defines tone marks, which the Taiwanese systems completely overlook, or regard as optional. Thatâs as stupid as a written language that misses out vowels (um ⌠apologies to any Israelis on here )
But yeah, if they canât keep it consistent, just bloody get rid of it! In road names (where romanization arguably has genuine value), the same characters are used over and over again - there must be three million instances of ä¸ćŁčˇŻ, for example. Travel/tourist guides could include a list of these commonly-used characters with their pronunciation.
Remember, romanization is used almost exclusively by tourists. Residents have no interest in it. If Taiwan wants to attract more tourism then the international system should be used. Thatâs Pinyin. Not whatever the Taipei Mayor pulled out of his ass.
what is wrong with New Row Mian? I donât see the problem.
Oh those bad locals did not care for standard rules for romanization. Are there any anyway?
However I do understand that our language expert sandman gets irate. He is so deep in his bi-lingual Chinese-English world he canât dive into the average Joeâs mind. I personally think he should take a step back and try to understand that not everybody in Taiwan can be a language genius like him.
that rant is hilarious - sandman complaining about locals bad English - last time I checked he was shouting " I wond too sleep" and got all upset when he did not get his dumplings.
Yes. Itâs called Pinyin. Itâs described in every tourist book. If you donât follow the rules nobody can figure out how itâs supposed to be pronounced. The reason is simple: unlike BoPoMoFo, roman letters do not represent specific phonetic sounds. The fact that Taiwanese people are, apparently, not even aware of these facts may be the root of the problem.
Imagine some American or British official deciding that, on Chinese-language public-service signs in the US or UK, some of the radicals look ugly and he will tidy them up so that Chinese tourists can âunderstand them betterâ. Everyone, including his boss and his colleagues, would think he was a prizewinning wanker and tell him to follow the damn rules. In Taiwan, heâd be praised for his creativity and excellent knowledge of Engrish.
Moreover, Taiwan has officially adopted Hanyu Pinyin (a move that has the support of the foreign community). Taipei officially adopted Hanyu Pinyin even before the central government did â which was also widely and enthusiastically supported by the foreign community. So, yes, itâs a rule â Taipeiâs own rule â that the city government is supposed to use Hanyu Pinyin.
But one thing the foreign community certainly never requested or desired was for local officials to just make something up and inflict it upon foreigners in the guise of helping them.
[quote=âtoudukeâ]what is wrong with New Row Mian? I donât see the problem.
Oh those bad locals did not care for standard rules for romanization. Are there any anyway?
However I do understand that our language expert sandman gets irate. He is so deep in his bi-lingual Chinese-English world he canât dive into the average Joeâs mind. I personally think he should take a step back and try to understand that not everybody in Taiwan can be a language genius like him.
that rant is hilarious - sandman complaining about locals bad English - last time I checked he was shouting " I wond too sleep" and got all upset when he did not get his dumplings.[/quote]
Try looking up ânew rowâ in a Chinese-English pinyin dictionary without altering the spelling. âNew rowâ is an attempt to be cute, but it is completely useless as a transliteration. In short, itâs a total waste of money and one has to wonder how someone could have gotten paid for something like this. If you still donât âseeâ the problem, then you are blind and/or being deliberately obtuse.
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