![]() Well, someone's gotta say it, so it might as well be me: The sign said Here we've got them everywhere.įrom a friend who probably wouldn't want to be named: In "A glazed panel in the absence of manifestations" ( ), signs were lacking. Instead of impossibly posting myriad signs of unknown content, the recipient posted the only available referent, once. I imagined a harried functionary interpreting a terse instruction, "Post this sign everywhere", with no referent of "this" to be seen. What a disappointment to see a clean sign, not a single signature anywhere! ![]() Perhaps because I read this in the feed first (with a reader that's text only, stripping the markup and images), I imagined a sign nearly obliterated by signatures… along with the desk, and the wall behind it, and the door(s), and maybe even the faces and clothing of the people at the desk. Filed by Victor Mair under Lost in translation, Writing systems.If this kind of misunderstanding is possible with only three characters (and it happens a lot in daily life), one can well imagine the types and quantity of reading errors that result from character texts that have no spaces at all (as in Classical Chinese) or only when marked by punctuation as in Modern Chinese. This is a good example of how Pinyin (Romanization) with proper word division is clearer than writing only in characters without any spacing. ![]() The erroneous rendering on the sign is taken directly from Google Translate. Instead, 签到处 should have been parsed as qiāndào chù, lit., "signing-in place", i.e., "sign-in desk" or "registration desk / department", as one might encounter at a conference or workshop. The following sign was posted on Weibo (China's Twitter clone):Īs it appears on the sign, the translator must have parsed the three characters 签到处 as qiān dàochù, though the correct grammatical order and wording for "sign everywhere" would be dàochù qiānmíng 到处签名. ![]()
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