First I laugh, then I cry: websurfing for catharsis

Ow! Ow! My sides hurt! Someone (which is not, HikerDude wishes me to clarify, the same person as HikerDude. Someone is someone else and not the person you may think it is; in fact, Someone specifically forbids us all to think of themselves.) has been roaming the blogosphere and finding yummy tidbits. Such as this delightful array of culinary possibilities found on the menu of an Asian restaurant could not be the result of a machine translation. Machine translations may be idiom-blind, but they are at least consistent.

Oh, the verbs on this menu; oh, the mountains of food offered. Literally: “Good to eat mountain, 18 yuan”. Jon Rahoi may not have been quite that hungry, but I’ve got a teen with a hollow leg to feed. I wonder if they produce a cookbook... ...perhaps all the extra Internet publicity will let this fine establishment hire a translator, instead of playing with the Verbs And Ingredients refrigerator magnet set they seem to have used along with a twelve-sided and chisel to create their piece of art.

Menus like this – or not quite exactly like this, because this one is rather extreme, but you know, menus aspiring to this - are a very good reason to keep translators’ meet-ups confined to homes and parks. If there’s anything a group of translators can proofread, they’ll do THAT before ordering, and if you’ve planned on eating at the meet-up, you’ll end up hungry.

But if only one (or two) translators meet at a restaurant like that, it’s not just a great time to use their phonecam; it’s a business opportunity. “I’ll trade you an actual translation for a meal” is an acceptable proposition. And menus change all the time. It is such a pity that I can’t pull that off in my home town.

I’m not sure that the same strategy could be applied to Jon Rahoi’s latest post, where he remarks that This stuff reads like they're inventing English, not learning it. We need a massive airlift of retrofitted Speak N Spells dropped over Asia. How about starting with a massive reeducation on the value of professional translation? And editing?

Translation is not required for the Japanese TV spots on housekeeping you’ll find behind the link. In it, you can learn how to stop a baby from crying by blowing Japanese text at it, how to peel a potato, and how to fry onions into a golden paste. Oh, yeah, and a slower version of that shirt-folding video. Someone and I have perfected our technique by now.

Last but not least, under the general category of “job openings that seem least likely to generate good feelings for interpreters”, Australia tells Moslems to preach in English or hire translators. I find this offensive in a bunch of ways, not least of which being professional outrage: so, the Australian government wants to allocate language resources for religious applications, and urges residents of that country to “be more Australian”, with their religious worship first? Gosh, y’guyz! Haven’t any books about the consequences of religious persecution hit the down under?

That’s all for today. I’ll go stomp around the block and maybe the bad taste (pun intended) from Oz will go away.