In LA

I was just paging through a bunch of photos I shot with my iPhone while in China and came across photos I’d shot of a menu that featured some amazing English translations. I present to you a collection entitled “Customer get angry”:

I really wish I’d asked if I could buy one of these menus, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Although I think many of these translations are hilarious, it is worth noting that I don’t think badly of whoever put it together –it was extremely courteous of them. Very very few English speakers ever pop into the small town of Hengdian, let alone drop into Ai Qi Coffee. So kudos to that establishment for trying (and largely succeeding) to accomodate the occasional English-speaker.
Customer not really angry.

1. Again, those not accustomed to China might also find "Super cows feet pizza" to be noteworthy [↩]
2. I suspect a scientific name crept into their woeful Chinese-English dictionary [↩]

A “Betty Boop” store.


The Table Tennis section of East Nanjing Road’s big Li-Ning store.


Pleasant Goat wishes you all a jittery, happy, new year.

The editor and I drove a few miles West the other night to get some food just outside of Lowell, and ended up stopping at La Te Da’s. From the road was visible a large banner across a truck reading “American Food”. As we approached the door, I noticed an older sign on the restaurant that read Hunan Garden. Perhaps there’d been a recent change in ownership?

Once seated inside, all became clear, or somewhat clear. The waitress/owner handed us two menus each, one a La Te Da’s menu and one Hunan Garden. She’d opened Hunan Garden at that location about 12 years ago. Recently business had slowed so she’d changed the name of the place to La Te Da’s and had made a new menu of all-American food, but she also hands customers the old menu containing American Chinese food standards as well as a section of burgers. At the bottom of the new La Te Da’s menu small print states “A Hunan Garden Restaurant”.

It’s a family-run place, everyone working there was a niece or nephew of the waitress/proprietor. Nobody in the family appeared to be Chinese. I asked her why her original restaurant had been named “Hunan Garden”, why Hunan?¹ She responded that Hunan is a Chinese vegetable².

Faced with two menus and a bewildering array of choices, I went for one of the daily specials, the “fish fry”. The cole-slaw and the breading on the fish were both pretty tasty.

1. I figured maybe she’d met someone from the region, or liked Hunan cuisine. [↩]
2. It might be time to edit that wikipedia entry. [↩]

As if figuring out the pinyin romanization system wasn’t enough of a pain. Am I going to have to learn another romanization system in order to be able to learn Chinese from fortune cookies? It literally took me 10 minutes to figure out what Chinese words were written on this little scrip of paper.

Anyone know what romanization system would turn “你要什么?”¹ (pinyin: “ni yao shenme”) into “nee ya shau mor”? Bizzarity.

1. That’s my best guess as to the Chinese phrase they’ve attempted to convey. I’d translate it as “What do you want?” [↩]

This is by far the weirdest, most entertaining, and simply the best talent display at a beauty pageant that I’ve ever seen.¹ That’s Lisa Wong, the winner of this year’s Narcissus pageant² . I feel mildly proud of myself for recognizing the character with which she stamps her work in her final flourish³ , and mildly amused that it’s also the last name of a ton of my friends. Wong or Huang (黄) is apparently the 7th most common surname in China⁴ . Score yet another win for the Wongs, perhaps both the world’s largest and most talented family.

Happy year of the Ox y’all!

1. Props to the blog angryasianman for introducing me to this great find. [↩]
2. a pageant thrown by the Hawaiian Chinese Chamber of Commerce [↩]
3. my pride tempered by the fact that it’s a really common character, it’s the word for the color “yellow” [↩]
4. Wang (王), meaning “King”, is apparently the 8th most common surname in China [↩]

People have written me today to remind me that it’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day. The most basic way to celebrate this recently-created holiday is to randomly scatter the word “arr” into one’s utterances. Arr. People here in the U.S. think this is “fun”, but they only get to do this one day a year.

One of the characteristics of the Beijing dialect is the addition of a “retroflex ‘r’” to the end of many a word. When I lived in Beijing, I liked to imagine that every day was “Talk Like a Pirate Day”, arr.

Given the fact that modern piracy is more likely to involve someone holding an RPG while shouting commands in Indonesian or Somali than anything resembling Captain Jack Sparrow and friends, and given the fact that Beijingers today say ‘arr’ more frequently than has any pirate in the history of piracy and piracy-related entertainment, I’d like to propose that this international holiday be renamed to “Talk Like a Beijinger Day”. Who’s with me? Arr.

The wonder of modern Beijing. No tilt-shift action here, just a photo taken in the Beijing Urban Planning Museum

You knew that fortune cookies are an American invention, right? They’re related to a Japanese pastry, and were either invented in San Francisco or LA early last century. They do not exist in China. Armed with this knowledge, please to enjoy youtube clip:

Thanks to boingboing.net for bringing this video to my attention, and Jennifer 8 Lee for creating it (I think). I love it. I don’t know where the video was shot exactly, but it makes me miss the people of Beijing. There’s a nice cross-section of people and places in the video. Their good-natured reactions to the strange cookies are awesome.

There’s a video up on one of China’s youtube clones of a Chinese TV broadcast, which features footage of actress Li Bing Bing re-recording some lines of dialogue in a session with director Rob Minkoff and ADR Editor Chris Sheldon. It’s over here.

It would seem that progress has already been made on porting my favorite Chinese input method for OS X to the iPhone (Chinese URL, English URL¹ ).

If 3rd party application development is to proceed at this rapid pace in countries in which the iPhone is not even yet sold (China), and without the distribution of an official SDK, and with not just a lack of support but an antagonistic attitude on the part of Apple towards the use of 3rd-party applications and the users who love them –just imagine how quickly the stable of quality iPhone apps will grow with the existence of an SDK, as iPhones begin to be sold around the globe.

A very good call on Apple’s part to open up the phone to outside developers. As a wise man once said, “developers developers developers developers!” Apple does well to not give a cold shoulder to the people who actually want to develop apps (and thus add value to) the iPhone.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Chinese, Chinese IME, Chinese Language, IME, iPhone, Macintosh, OS X, Pinyin, SMS, software

1. half-assed translation courtesy of babelfish [↩]

(hover over any of the Chinese text below to see a pop-up translation. Technique grabbed from the tip here.)

My cell phone just rang, I fumbled to place my bluetooth headset on my ear and answered.

Caller:	Can I speak to Yang Xiao Hong?
Me:	Who?
Caller:	mumble fuzz mumble Yang Xiao Hong
Me:	您找谁
Caller:	杨小红
Me:	我不认识杨小红，我是范杰。杨小红是功夫之王的演员马？
Caller:	不是， 杨小红是什么什么什么什么什么
Me:	Sorry, I didn’t catch that. Is Yang Xiao Hong related to the film 功夫之王? I ask because I might know who you’re looking for. I was just in China working on that film.
Caller:	Oh, sorry, this is a wrong number. 杨小红 just called me on the other line. Your number is very close to hers.
Me:	OK.
Caller:	Sorry, bye.

There were many odd things about this conversation:

1. Someone with a 626 area code called me, looking for someone with a Chinese name.
2. I heard a Chinese accent and reflexively switched into speaking mandarin –This is something I do with some regularity now in China when communication in broken English doesn’t seem to be working out. I did this quickly and without thinking.
3. Conversation continued for a bit in Mandarin.
4. When I realized I was not in China, was missing some relevant vocabulary, and that communication would likely be more fluid in English (the caller’s English was likely way better than my mandarin) I switched back.
5. My mandarin pronunciation sounded significantly worse to my ears than it did when I was in China –gotta get more practice.

Technorati Tags: Chinese Language, context switching, mandarin, wrong number