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Funny enough whenever I see a tattoo on a westerner's body, not only is it usually wrong in the grammar/spelling sense. But it is ugly as hell. Would you let a
by swang 8y ago
Funny enough whenever I see a tattoo on a westerner's body, not only is it usually wrong in the grammar/spelling sense. But it is ugly as hell. Would you let a 5 year old tattoo the word, "Strength" onto your body? That's akin to what I see when I see the typography/style of the tattoo. "Sir, not only does it not say Superman, the characters are backwards and missing strokes"
Any Chinese person who tells you the truth about what your tattoo says is being very kind to you, but most Chinese won't say anything bad since they have no reason to embarrass the person.
One time when I was still in college my family took a trip out to Mexico. I forgot what store we went into but the cashier asked my dad to write down the cashier's name (sorry forgot that too) into Chinese. My dad spent a decent amount of time to think of the proper characters, wrote it down and we were on our way. I still think about that incident a lot, like what if my dad was a jerk and wrote something stupid for this guy to get tattooed (he wouldn't). but even then he's essentially trusting my dad is not messing up his name in Chinese (it definitely wasn't something like Mark).
- Pamar 8y agoSee http://hanzismatter.blogspot.de/?m=1 http://hanzismatter.blogspot.de/?m=1
- grzm 8y agoYeah, mistranslations can be frustrating. But this has nothing to do with the submission, which has plenty of interesting content. Please don’t derail the substance with unrelated complaints.
- yial 8y agoI found his comments to be interesting, and related in a train of thought way to the submission. I’m sorry it didn’t add additional interesting content for you, but it did for me, and I don’t find these sorts of comments to be a derail.
- swang 8y agois my post a complaint or just an anecdote? the actual article talks about the style and design of a chinese character, which is what my anecdote is about. westerners ignore that aspect of character writing, which is incredibly important. are you a mod? why don't you let the mods mod.
- setr 8y agoYou'll see the same thing with japan randomly using english words (like one word of a song), though afaik they usually use them correctly (but very awkwardly). But the chinese tattoos, and the english words, aren't meant for those native speakers to see. The tattoos are meant for other english speakers to see, and the words are meant for other japanese speakers to hear. They're not meant to be understood, so much as just being visually/audibly cool. It looks good, and it sounds good, and its in an environment where almost no one will understand it, so it really doesn't matter if the content is correct. The idea is sufficient. Now of course, if you get a chinese tattoo mispelled and move to china, you'll look like a bumbling idiot. Its the same as being a native speaker and mispelling it. The context/environment matters, when deciding how important that mistake is.
- komali2 8y agoReminds me of when I lived in China with my friend, anytime we left the city for some tourism in the boondocks, he'd wear this white T-shirt with nothing on it except big block characters on the front - "外國人". (In simplified though, which apparently I don't have on my phone). Just means "foreigner." Chinese people got the biggest hoot out of it.
- hawkice 8y ago外国人 in simplified. To be fair, I've seen a Taiwanese person with the English "spice girl" as a tattoo, which is a reverse-poor-translation, because it sounds like a singular member of a defunct pop band. Makes more sense in Chinese.
- torgoguys 8y ago>Funny enough whenever I see a tattoo on a westerner's body, not only is it usually wrong in the grammar/spelling sense. But it is ugly as hell. Tattoo characters being "ugly as hell" aren't unique to Eastern/Asian script on Westerners. There is plenty of ugly Western/Latin script on Westerners too.
- wolco 8y agoTo be honest the type of person who would get random chinese writing are usually putting less priorty on getting the exact details perfect rather than making a mysterious statement. They are the least likely group to have Asian friends.