Recycling

Just another Engrish picture tonight. This one comes from a disposable chopsticks cover at a local restaurant. What they obviously mean to say is to please recycle the wrapper, which is odd because very few people are going to take this out of the restaurant. (click for full size)

It’s interesting to note here that in Chinese, verbs are never conjugated as they are in English (I run, he runs, etc). There is 1 form of the verb and that is how it always is for all subjects. Even tenses are denoted by the addition of characters/other words to signify past tense, etc, so the original verb form remains. Because of this, many Chinese learning or using English have a hard time with verb conjugations – either forgetting to conjugate or overdoing it and getting it wrong.

More often than not, bad translations are the result of someone using Google Translate or a similar tool; they type in the Chinese characters and get back a literal word-for-word translation that seems close but doesn’t quite hit the mark in the other language. This is more than likely one of those examples.


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