Bad English

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I was wondering if anyone had any funny experiences with bad english. Most of things like this are japanese, but they come from other countries too. here are my favorites:

an account written by my freind who worked in japan for a while:

Finally, the office in which I was working had a set of
English instructions for the phone system that had been typed up by one of
the Japanese in the office. At one point, the instructions were meant to
include the sentence "Hook the phone," meaning (I assume) "hang up the
phone."
The author of the instructions apparently didn't know how to spell "hook",
so I suppose he tried to sound it out. There is no "hoo" sound in
Japanese. The closest is something like "foo", which generally gets
transliterated as "fu". As for the "k" sound, the author apparently
decided that in this case "ck" was more likely to be correct than just
"k".
So the end result of all this was that the instructions contained the
sentence "**** the phone." For the Americans in the office, it was good
for about ten minutes of barely-contained laughter.



Of course, everyones favorite has to be...
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!!!!


--FenixStrife

 

I think our culture minister said something like this: ....and as the prick above the i(eye)... It is supposed to mean: as the spot above the i... which is a danish saying, which means: Last but not least.....

 

Please, let me write down the whole story from the "All your base are belong to us"-flash animation:

Captain - "What happen?"
Controll - "Someone set up us the bomb"
Captain - "We get signal"
Controll - "Main screen turn on"
Captain - "It's you"
Evil fellow - "How are you gentlemen? All your base are belong to us. You are on the way for destruction"
Captain - "What you say?"
Evil fellow - "You have no chance to survive make your time. Hahaha"

Anyone really wants this animation (it's so damn good), I can post it on the net and give you the URL.

 

A Sign on a physicians door somewhere in eastern-europe: Specialist for women and other diseases.

 

Here is the full badly translated version of the intro to ZeroWing:


In A.D. 2101
War was beginning

Outside Ship - An explosion occurs.

Ship's Bridge
Captain: "What happen ?"
Mechanic: "Somebody set up us the bomb."

Close-Up of Excited Communications Officer
Operator: "We get signal."
Captain: "What !"

Ship's Bridge
Operator: "Main screen turn on."
(CATS appears)
Captain: "It's you !!"

Close up of CATS
CATS: "How are you gentlemen !!"
CATS: "All your base are belong to us."
CATS: "You are on the way to destruction."

Close up of captain & CATS
Captain: "What you say !!"
CATS: "You have no chance to survive make your time."

Ship's Bridge
CATS: "Ha ha ha ha ...."

Close up of Forlorn Captain
Operator: "Captain !!"

Ship's Bridge (ZIGs on monitors)
Captain: "Take off every 'ZIG'!!"

Shows a ZIG pilot powering up
Captain: "You know what you doing."

Shows a ZIG moving into launch position
Captain: "Move 'ZIG'."

ZIGs on monitors, Bridge Explodes
Captain: "For great justice."

The ship explodes.
A lone ZIG zooms into view!


Here is the way it should be translated


A.D. 2101
The battle began

Outside Ship - An explosion occurs.

Ship's Bridge
Captain: "What happened!?"
Mechanic: "Someone detonated bombs all around us!"

Close-Up of Excited Communications Officer
Operator: "Captain! Incoming transmission!"
Captain: "What!?"

Ship's Bridge
Operator: "Image coming through on the main monitor."
(CATS appears)
Captain: "You... you are...!!"

Close up of CATS
CATS: "You appear to be preoccupied, gentlemen." (sarcasm)
CATS: "Thanks to the cooperation of the UN forces,
all of your bases now belong to CATS."
CATS: "Your ship too, shall soon be destroyed."

Close up of captain & CATS
Captain: "Im.. Impossible!" (or "F.. Foolishness!")
CATS: "We thank you for your cooperation." (more sarcasm)
CATS: "Enjoy the remaining moments of your lives...."

Ship's Bridge
CATS: "Hahahahaha ...."

Close up of Forlorn Captain
Operator: "Captain!?"

Ship's Bridge (ZIGs on monitors)
Captain: "Launch all ZIG fighters!"

Shows a ZIG pilot powering up
Captain: "All we can do is entrust it to them..."

Shows a ZIG moving into launch position
Captain: "Give us hope for our future..."

ZIGs on monitors, Bridge Explodes
Captain: "We're counting on you, ZIG!!"

The ship explodes.
A lone ZIG zooms into view!

 

My uncle was on holliday in germany and as he could speak no german and only a little english he went with english.

Anyway this is what happened.. This coloured guy came up to him and asked him to support this good cause. My uncle then replies; sorry I'm black. (as the norwegian word for out of money is "BLAKK") Needless to say this guy got somewhat offended...

 

Not entirely relevant, but I happen to have noticed that there are a lot of people here from non-english speaking countries, and the language in their posts is indistinguishable from mine (and often better), and I can only speak English, and would spend years learning how to say "Hello, my name is Andrew, um, can we speak my language? I don't know yours." in their language. It's quite humbling.

[This message has been edited by Ironbeard (edited June 01, 2001).]

 

heh, I speak enough spanish to get by, although I know my grammar sounds like a three year olds. A few years ago I was helping to take care of a group of foriegn exchange students (french and italian kids) and it really opened my eyes. Almost all of them could speak three languages.

 

well english is my primary langauge (although you couldnt tell) and i learn fremch at school everyday and im not too bad at it, i know very little latin and even less greek.

 

Watshi wa Ben desu
Kochirawa Andrew desu
Genki desu ka
Igirisujin desu
Tabbisoku no shusshin desu
Gakusei desu
Dokushin desu

Just to show that i am multilingual.
Work out what language this is.

Then if you work out this sentence i will give you public praise:

ashikubi o nusumare mashita

Go on try to work it out.

 

I would guess japanese, because japanese words always ends on a vocal or n. Anyway, as a nine year old, I spend a whole day alone in a german metropolis, armed only with a paper with some german verbs and the danish translation written beside. Now that was an experience!

 

For good English, just look at Tal, he speaks better english than me (not that hard actually, but you get the idea)!

 

While on the subject of good English, my ex was Danish and her english was fantastic. Not only was her written english perfect (like Tal's) but her spoken was better than mine too. Her accent also showed no trace of Danish. I knew her for about two years before we got together and didn't actually realise she wasn't english! None of my friends could tell either and were amazed when they were told.

Of course there were the occaisional problems. She never really got used to the relative strength of the different swear words. In particular she always forgot that 'twat' was not something to call someone being stupid while grandparents were around Come to think of it though, that was about the only one and it is a grey area. She never used the stronger swear words unless I provoked her

[This message has been edited by Darien Noella (edited July 07, 2001).]

 

I am also fluent in pig-latin, an extremely difficult language to master when speaking out loud (easy to write down though), backward compatible with any language, a bit like cars.

 

Well, at school, in my friends IPM (computers) class an Indian (not American Indian) student teacher was taking the class and she asked everyone to take out their "floppy-dicks" (even funnier if you know the accent). Everyone was on the floor for like, 5 minutes! If you havent figured it out she was trying to say floppy-disks. )

[This message has been edited by Drunken Monk (edited June 03, 2001).]

 

I'm from Finland and I can remember a very funny event from 5th or 6th grade. A friend of mine said "I'm a hoover", when he meant "I have a hoover". Everyone laughed at him. He is pretty good in english nowadays and that's probably because he plays a LOT of Final Fantasy(7,8,9). I learned my english in school and on the net. I remember when I was eight I went to IRC #bar and said "I'm only 8 years old. Please do not kick me." I got immediatly kicked.

I just remembered another event when I was playing starcraft. This korean dude said og og og og!! And I was confused at first. Then I realized that he meant go go go go! I once played D2 with a korean and he walks right next to me in Lut Gholein and says "give item". I was in kurast once and I was playing with a korean(probably). I said to him "use iron maiden please!!" but he didn't. After a while I went to town and he came with me. I was extremely annoyed because he started following me and tried to open the trade screen with me. So I asked him what did he want and he said something like "show" "show item" and I answered "what item?" and then he said "iron maiden". Needless to say how hard it was to try to convince him that iron maiden is a necromancer skill and not an item.

We get signal!

 

ACH! Typo...

....once played D2 with a korean and he walked(was walks) right next to me ......

I suck!

[Um... read the Boards O'Magick FAQ; you can edit your posts to clean up that stuff... BTA]

[This message has been edited by Blackthorne TA (edited June 07, 2001).]

 

Hmm, my experiences with english aren´t as funny and about dialect: After spending a week in Edinburgh/ Scotland I found out that it wasn´t that difficult to talk with the people there despite their dialect. This greatly supported my self esteem.

Traveling to Glasgow, just about 30km away, was a shock for me for I no longer understood the people there and they refused to (a) speak english or (b) at least slowly .... despite that is wasn´t too bad.

The funniest english I found to be spoken by french ... they tend to speak all the english words french which usually sounds *very* strange.

 

The French accent is probably my favorite of English-speaking people... while East Indian is the worst.