In Wales road signs are printed in both English and Welsh. When a new sign was being made someone sent the English part to a translator, who’s out of office message was in Welsh. They assumed that message was the translation and printed it on the sign.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mistranslated-welsh-traffic-sign/
Not a translation error but the worst tattoo I ever saw on someone was a guy with a bloody tampon tramp stamp.
bloody tampon tramp stamp
“bloody” as in bloody idiot, or “bloody” as in black pudding?
My guy. My dude. My man.
Do you know what a tampon is / does? You might be able to infer from that alone.
My man, my dude, my guy,
That is fuckin’ why it’s ambiguous.
Considering the specific context, that’s what makes it very not-so-ambiguous.
And I’m sure folks that identify a specific way would also agree.
Plus, the OP confirmed it. 🕵️♂️🕵️♀️
So I went looking to find out what you’re talking about, and I came up with nothing. So linky with the op comment confirming what they meant.
There are plenty of snarky things I could say. I refrain from being the ass I’d like, you haven’t proven to deserve it.
I was not at all trying to be snarky in any possible way. I guess I should have been more clear in saying what I really meant: women would probably understand this more clearly than others. My apologies if I seemed like I was trying to upset you in anyway. Tone is weird through text.
But here’s the confirmation: https://feddit.uk/comment/12718867
Indeed 'twas a tampon with blood upon it
@[email protected] here’s the OP confirmation
Alexa, what’s a tampon?
I assume this is one of them dual meanings
Given your job is a translator, why would you assume the person emailing you can understand Welsh? That one is entirely on the translator.
Unfortunately, it’s been dead for a couple of years now, but this blog used to translate everyone’s Asian-language tattoos.
A significant number of them use characters that are not from any language at all.
Quite a few that do have meanings are pretty funny, sometimes are quite ironic too.
Is this real?
Seems like it. I suppose it’s an honest mistake to make, she (or her PR team) put the Kanji for “seven” and “ring” (but also more generally means circular or loop or wheel), but Kanji when combined doesn’t always mean what you’d expect it to mean. In this case those two Kanji together is a noun meaning charcoal grill. Kanji combinations can be highly logical, where their standalone meanings come together to a very sensible combined meaning. But sometimes they don’t make much sense and the reasoning for the combined meaning is lost to time.
But come on, man… Just search for it online or open a dictionary before you permanently write something on your body.
It’s bit of both. 七輪 can mean seven rings, but more often it refers to the grill. Just as 五輪 can mean 5 rings, but it also means the olympics.
Hentai Gaijin
Should’ve been ゲーリー, not ゲリ. No wonder people got confused.
This would be perfect for me and my IBS-D
Geri is my favourite Indonesian crackers, but not so much the chocolate ones…
In high school there was a Chinese girl who hung out with us. We were at at an arcade after school one day, and this guy comes up to her. She’s 16. He’s 40. He says something like “Hey baby, check this out!”
He takes off his shirt to reveal a not at all impressive body. But his chest had something tattood on it in Chinese.
She goes wide eyed, and runs off. When we caught up to her (obviously without the guy) she’s having trouble breathing, because she’s giggling so hard. Just try to visualize that. It’s not a belly laugh, it’s a giggle, but she’s giggling so hard she’s wheezing.
Now she spoke full perfect english, and only had a slight barely noticable accient. But when we asked her what was so funny, she went full stereotype Chinese voice from how amused she was at the tattoo.
“His chest…it say ASSHOOOOEEEE!!!” (She was saying asshole, but I typed it phonetically how she said it, and with the enthusiasm she said it).
She just burried her face in her hands, and had the biggest giggle fit I’ve ever seen. She later said “He must have been an asshole to the tattoo artist. He’ll never know!”
I mean considering the fact that he flashed himself to a 16 year old girl without any warning, I’d say that tattoo was well deserved.
宫保鸡丁
kung pao chicken.
he thought it was super funny, like he was in on the joke.
I was once at a convenience store, run by a Chinese man, and this 30ish girl in a tank top, obviously a regular comes in and says @look I got my sons name tattooed. Then she says, “look, Aitor@“. The guysmiles nervously. She leaves, and I ask the guy, who es shaking his head, and he says that it was some random mataré sign.
That is actually the same thing.
I know someone who has something tattooed on him: in Thai.
As in, it’s a phrase which says ‘in Thai’ in Thai. So when people ask him, what is that? He says ‘it’s in Thai’. They say yes, but what is it? ‘It’s ‘in Thai’’. Yes, but…
You get the idea.
That’s the kind of stupid I like.
This is like setting your guest WiFi password to “It’s on the wall over there.”
I knew a barista that set the wifi pass to “ten bucks”.
Some guy came up to me when I first joined the military and told me “hey I got your name tattooed on my ass. Don’t believe me?”
Sure enough there was “YOUR NAME” tattooed on his ass check. I’m pretty sure he just liked showing people his ass.
Was it a nice ass at least?
It has to be if your name is on it
Sometimes, you put your name on the best ass you can get even if it’s not the best ass to put your name on.
Because your name is such dogshit that it makes everything around it nicer by comparison
It wasn’t plump, like how I prefer but I could see why some people would think his ass was nice. Being fit and young and all that.
I’m thinking that’s a combination of a lost bet and some cleverness.
Either it’s just a thing round here or that person is my childhood friend’s cousin. Their grandma wasn’t happy about getting got
Is your friend Steve-O?
Who’s on first?
My sister’s first year in college she got the Chinese word for LOVE tattooed. Later she found out it was the correct symbol, only mirrored. I called her EVOL for a while
Tattooing yourself for the bit is next-level.
A buddy of mine got “OUCH” on the inside of his lip. Ironically, it hurt a lot less than the piece on his shin.
Trolling level expert 😂
I have a tattoo that means “I don’t know, I don’t speak japanese.” It works when an English speaker asks me what it means, and it also worked with the Japanese when I lived in Japan and didn’t speak the language.
I want “pretty nice and vanilla guy” tattooed on me, and I’ll say it means “horrible pervert”
I bestow upon you the title of 凡人 (bonjin), in Japanese means an unremarkably mediocre person. You can tattoo it and tell people it means psychopath instead of course, who’s stopping you?
remarkably mediocre. give them an iq test and they’d get exactly 100
Well that’s fairly interesting
remarkably so
Don’t leave out the part about your omniscience
I never tattooed it on myself, or anyone else, but I used to work at a local greasy spoon, and knew a Professor of English that came in regularly, who was originally from China. I asked him for the name specific characters that phonetically made up the syllables of my and my girlfriend’s names, he went to wait for his food, and came back with the characters he thought would work best. I used those to burn the characters into the weed stash box that she and I had made.
We told everyone that asked that we had no clue what it actually meant, it just sounded like our names.
But…what did it mean?
English names tend do just get characters that sound phonetically like their English pronunciation. As such, a lot of names, especially longer ones, don’t mean anything. If you directly translated them, a lot of the time you’d get like “cabbage the horse wheel” or something.
If you directly translated them, a lot of the time you’d get like “cabbage the horse wheel” or something.
That reminds me of the “Password Strength” comic by xkcd. All right, it’s settled. Next time I need new password, I’m feeding random names into a phonetic name translator.
So the characters are still words, right? As in not phonetics? Would it be like someone named Tristan getting the Spanish word Triste because it sounds like Tristan?
So the characters are still words, right?
Most likely yes. All characters in Chinese are defined jointly by the way it’s written, the pronunciation, and meaning. You can’t invent new characters like you would a new English word and have something that can be read out loud because there’s no system for deriving pronunciation from the written character itself.
I say most likely because there are still some characters that are phonetic in that their meaning is just the sound, but these don’t cover the whole spectrum of possible sounds in the language as far as I know. They also wouldn’t look as nice in tattoo form since they all use the same radical.
Tristán is a proper local name in Spanish
I’m aware, it was just the first English name and Spanish word I could think of that sounded similar for the example.
The Chinese English professor told me that my name meant something like “strong ox” and hers meant “beautiful lotus,” but I have no way to verify that, as I no longer have the box. She does.
i would guess your name is John? “strong ox” seems 犟 to me(upper part is strong, bottom ox), beautiful lotus i got no idea.
Shawn actually. But that does seem similar to the character he gave me
Ooo may I have a guess - Daniel and Lilian?
edit - typo
Nope.
Ah nevermind then. Thought I got what the characters were haha
Upvote becausei was sure you’d have it.
Same picture
Not the first time I’ve Lemmied this story, and it’s not a tattoo it’s a motorcycle decal. Kid turns up on a Kawasaki forum to show off his Ninja’s paint scheme, and on the front cowling are five kanji figures, the first and the third were identical. Someone asked “Why does your bike say ‘pig dog pig bird horse?’” He says “Nah man, it says N-I-N-J-A. That’s how you spell ‘Ninja’ in Japanese.”
I was in line behind someone who had 安 on her nape. I’m guessing she was going for a meaning of like peaceful or restful or something along those lines but you need a compound like 安心 or 安静 for that.
The character alone means more like cheap, at least in Japanese. Maybe it’s different in Chinese.
In Chinese, 安 by itself can mean secure. I think.
Yep, Chinese like to use single character to mean something, but the word generally have positive meaning so it’s used in name as well. Though i’m not sure if it’s surname, never heard anyone with that name, given name though yeah.
That’s actually hilarious.
Ehm… isn’t “日本” = “Japan” both in chinese and japanese?
Thats what google translate is telling me anyway
Yes.
Username checks out so I trust this commenter with my life right now.
The subtitle could have been not literal translation. The dialogue could have been “this is kanji for japan” or characters for japan. But the subtitle wrote Chinese for japan, because the movie/speaker was Chinese… Maybe
Removed by mod
there are no awards on Reddit anymore ?
it’s old, because it has reddit silver, but it’s not that old, because it has reddit silver.
Asian beauty makes me think of an ad for makeup. Alternatively, those cool looking mountains from old looking paintings that look like giant ant mounds.
