I’m sure some people will think I’m rude for making this post, but I don’t care. This is part of the entertainment I find in traveling–as an editor, it’s sometimes helpful to laugh at language.
When I travel around, I enjoy finding mangled English signs. China was the best place for this–I found plenty of amusement in the signs containing nonsense. Of course, there were a few that sounded poetic in their Chinglish.
In Japan I haven’t seen much of this. There aren’t a lot of signs in English. Most of the errors are simple typos and there’s very little attempt, intentional or unintentional, at poetic phrasing. And official signs seem to have been proofread, which is probably a sign of more foreign influence in the country.
During my day out in Enoshima and the surrounding area, I finally encountered a little bit of my mangled mother tongue. It wasn’t much, but it was still entertaining. There were even a few other signs that seemed almost intentional in their mistakes.
Of course, none of these will ever top the Google translation of a Japanese beer website last week: “It is a new genre that achieves a ‘horse of a mistake about beer.'” Although, after tasting the beer, I’m not sure I can call that an inaccurate translation.
