Lost in Translation

I know that half the time I speak or write Chinese, I sound like a complete idiot.  So I have great sympathy for the people here who write signs in English for tourists.  It’s not at all like translating from, say,  Spanish;  it’s more like translating from Klingon or Mimbari.

Here are some signs we’ve come across on this trip.

 This one has the simple typo-like error.  You can find ones like this all over the world.  Actually, they could have saved themselves the trouble of translating it;  it wasn't the English-reading tourists who were spiffing all over the place.

Here’s an interesting example of choosing the wrong meaning of a word.  I’m sure I do this all the time when I look up a word in the dictionary.  What is a yak angle, you may ask?  That third character, jiao, means corner, angle, or HORN.  (Why Salisbury?  I've got no idea.)

This one was at the Yak Meadow on Snow Mountain.  They were trying to say “stay on the path; don’t trample the meadow”.  If you look up those last two characters, the dictionary does indeed say “lawn”, but a real lawn as we think of it in the west is a pretty foreign concept.  Chinese gardens generally have trees, flowering shrubs, water features, and in between, elaborate stonework rather than grass.  How they came up with “stampede” is anyone’s guess.  It makes me picture a herd of startled tourists galloping across the meadow in a panic.

Here’s a translation that was just too literal.  The Chinese literally says, “caution fall water”, but it came out sounding like a command in English.

Now here’s a real head scratcher:

 It starts out making sense and then just goes careening off the rails.  When I have access to a character dictionary again, I’m going to look up all the words and try to decipher the meaning of this train wreck.