Isn't it plausible that nations with wholly different foundations of language have a larger degree of difficulty in translating?

Of course it's going to be disproportionately Asian. There's a broader range for error when compared to other nations that use the roman alphabet.

And the prevalence of Chinese/Japanese characters in similarly erred contexts in the US is pretty bloody funny. Mind, you have to be competent in those languages to appreciate the humor (there's a high barrier to entree, then). Anecdotally (I know, I know), I've seen numerous characters written incorrectly (missing a stroke on a character is common), upside down or backwards, and others. I've seen people who intended to have the characters for "feminine" and "strength" tattooed on them, only to fail to realize they've just tattooed the word "gravity" on their arm. I've seen people try to get "vampire" tattooed on them, only to see it be a brutalized phrase most closely translatable as "chain-smoking devil."

Tattoo artists with Kanji dictionaries are grammatically dangerous people.

Now, are there websites dedicated to Western abuse of Eastern language? Possibly; it's a bit ethnocentric to assume that they don't have a laugh at us, now, isn't it?

Personally, what I've noticed (and I tend to hang out in very odd and geeky corners of the internet, so my observations are probably not the norm) is that the same people who think Engrish is most hilarious are the same people who used to use lots of fan-Japanese. And quit, frequently because they kept seeing Engrish and realizing "You know, I probably sound that dumb in Japanese."

A lot of the time, there is an element of oh those silly foreigners, but it's always seemed to me (again, in the corners of the internet I hang out in) that it was a lot more because Japan in particular is such a force of fascination for a lot of people in the US. I mean, look at the popularity of anime and manga and jrpgs. I used to be a massive anime and manga fan, and still play a lot of rpgs from Japan, and I know in an odd sense, I always felt reassured seeing Japanese failing at English because hey, at least it meant I wasn't a complete dork for watching all that anime because they thought the West was neat right back.

Well, you can't deny that some of them - particularly this one: http://danspira.wordpress.com/2008/08/04/translate-server-error-would-you-like-files-with-that/ - are frigging hilarious.

Also, about that T-shirt, it seems to me that it's intended to be worn by an Asian, so it's a sort of self-humour rather than mockery of the other.

ENGRISH FAIL:

http://pervegalit.wordpress.com/2009/01/11/now-life-is-living-you/

(Ah, those poor illiterate gaijin.)

Fourth comment directed at Engrishfunny, not the linked site.

http://www.hanzismatter.com/

I live in Japan and I see a very large amount of 'Engrish' on a regular basis. Whenever it is done by an individual or small company, it's insensitive to make fun of them for trying.

When I see giant signs that obviously cost somebody a lot of money, then it's more incompetence and laziness than just a mistake. Japan is not an isolated island anymore and the fact that someone would spend a large amount of money on a sign or design and not have it checked by a native speaker is the fault of the maker and I feel is fair game for ridicule and I have no sympathy for. Bad spelling in particular is worthy of ridicule, as a simple spell checker could fix that.

I spoke to an American friend how used to correct English signs, and she said that in several occasions, after handing in her corrections, the executives wouldn't believe her and use the wrong 'Engrish' because it didn't make sense when translated back into Japanese.

On the other hand, this is not unique to English. My Japanese friend would constantly laugh at bad Japanese in America and there's a site for bad Japanese at http://sisogapore.com/

(note, the Japanese Katakana characters for 'n' and 'so' are ン and　ソ and are often confused. the website name refers to misspelling of Singapore)

I'm Japanese, I live in Japan, I make part of my living through nitpicking "Engrish". Having had my fair share of Engrish-speaking clients, I do get a kick out of Engrish com.
However, if Engrish really is a legacy of Japan's 'isolated island' past, which contributed to the development of 'Japaneseness', I might rather proudly wear that other T-shirt. (Now please excuse my bad Engrish)

I've lived (and taught English in) Russia, and there is plenty of "Russlish" around too. And when I make funny mistakes in my Russian or Swedish, I don't mind if people giggle.

While I obviously don't think we should make fun of individuals struggling with a second language, the results of bad translations are often just as funny as native speakers' plays on words, and I think we can laugh at the humor of the expressions themselves without attacking the people who made them. Language is beautiful and fun and should be played with and enjoyed.

I agree with Keith above that large companies who can't be bothered paying a decent translator/editor *deserve* to be laughed at. It's just part of basic professionalism in a globalized marketplace. This goes for translations to/from all languages, not just English.

If we can't laugh at a sign that says "Fat Kok", is life even worth living?

I don't think there's anything in particular wrong with having a chuckle at a poor translation, whether it's Japanese to English, English to Japanese, or any other set of languages. It is generally reflective of laziness and the use of machine translations or just grabbing the first "meaning" of several out of a translation dictionary. I think we laugh because it's genuinely unexpected, not because we think that the people who made it are stupid or anything.

I used to find the homophones a lot more funny but over the years as I've seen so many of them, they're pretty dull to me now. Oh yeah, "kok" or "prik" or whatever is a word in some other language. I heard from an Arabic friend that "ayr" means penis, so every time I say something about the air, it's funny. Except after you've heard it a thousand times, it loses something. For me, anyway.

I think it's (for me) partly a wry thing. English is so complex, and so full of idiom and metaphor, that a full grasp of what you're saying is incredibly difficult, especially for ESLers. It's not ignorance I think is funny, but the horrible tricky nuances. (The languages I've studied have some of these, but to my knowledge, not nearly as many. This has not prevented some hugely embarrassing mistakes.) It's also a testament that copying something without understanding (as with people who get characters or phrases tattooed on themselves) is a really bad idea.
It's also a fresh source of language and innovation. I love some of the "wrong" English I've read or heard. I have a notebook that says "This beats cockfighting!" And you know what? It's true. All the time. Even the worst stuff I write beats cockfighting.

English is so complex, and so full of idiom and metaphor, that a full grasp of what you’re saying is incredibly difficult, especially for ESLers.

Oh, come *on*. English is just your native language and unless you've got a college degree on linguistics, you probably haven't got a comparable grasp of other ones, that's why you think they're poorer in their expressive capacities. Those ESLers just have a different, sometimes overlapping, set of idioms in their respective mother tongues.

English is just your native language and unless you’ve got a college degree on linguistics, you probably haven’t got a comparable grasp of other ones, that’s why you think they’re poorer in their expressive capacities.

Fair enough. Having taught ESL, I know that the students struggle with the sheer amount of idiom and slang and new words and specific regional differences. They've often claimed that English is more slang/idiom heavy, but it's possible they see it as a greater number because it's relatively new.

I do think that it's burgeoning universality lends itself to a larger number of permutations, as people absorb/change/borrow/add aspects. The structure is pretty flexible, so it's easy to verbify and then make verbs adjectives, until a word can morph to fit any particular part of the sentence - and then morph to mean something completely opposite of what it once was.

Nevertheless, seeing these "Engrish" pieces helps me to understand how difficult language acquisition is, and to see where people make mistakes that are potentially embarrassing (especially in a formal, over-seas situation).

Laugh at Engrish. Laugh at people laughing at Engrish. Laugh at people laughing at people laughing at Engrish.
Laugh at so many different levels, try that for different sets of languages, enjoy the horrible tricky nuances in all kinds of laughter. LOL.

Elena: English is one of the most difficult languages to learn, according to an acquaintance of mine who is a linguist from Harvard and can speak 7 languages plus read sanskrit. At least, it is if your native language was not in the Indo-European language family, though even among those English is kind of weird. For one thing, it's more of a mutt of a language than most, and there are so many exceptions to just about every grammatical or spelling rule that plenty of native speakers write their share of engrish too (or engredneck, engangster, engcajun, etc.).

Being overloaded with idiom and metaphor and endless exceptions to rules has nothing to do with a language's capacity for expression (except possibly inhibiting it), it just makes it comparatively harder to learn how to express oneself in that language. These challenges to learning English do not imply anything at all about the expressive capacity of any other language, and it didn't appear to me that Anita was claiming such. But maybe she was? English can be very ambivalent, after all.

Besides, no language manages to perfectly convey a thought or feeling because even speaking in your native tongue requires translating your thoughts and feelings into that language, and we don't always do a great job ("Uh, what I meant to say was...").

The counter-intuitive juxtapositions non-native speakers sometimes make when attempting to use a foreign language can be profound as well as funny. The homophones are usually just funny. For me, the humor is in the unexpected novelty; it's not any kind mockery aimed at people who didn't quite get a translation right.

Ich bin ein Berliner!

http://www.hanzismatter.com/

Mocking mistaken uses of Chinese characters by Westerns, and telling us what we're really having tatooed on ourselves.

Village Idiot: Look, my mother tongue is Spanish. I'm fluent in English, less so in German, and through my education I've done some French and Latin. I'm presently trying to learn Japanese. Let me tell you that German is IMO a lot harder to learn than English: word genders have no relation to word genders in Romance languages, verbs are just as irregular as English, there are cases like Latin, and everything is declined. Oh, and word order is whacked out. English grammarians complain about ending a sentence with a proposition, German has sometimes the equivalent of a phrasal verb at the beginning and the proposition that gives meaning to the verb at the very end, sometimes after a very, very lengthy sentence with subordinate clauses.

English is *easy*. And its worldwide popularity as second language/ lingua franca should be proof that people all over the planet can effectively use it to communicate without that many trouble, regardless of the language they were schooled in.

FWIW, the single most difficult thing I found about English were phrasal verbs. When you've been using the verb "explotar" all your life, "explode" comes a lot quicker to the mind than "blow out", and the change in meanings for some verbs like "set" or "make" depending on the proposition is maddening.

As for languages being mutts, one of the things I found most puzzling about Romanian is that it's like a lot like Spanish minus the thousands of words derived from Arabic and with thousands of words derived from Slavic languages. We've got words from Pre-Roman languages, Basque, Latin (and Low Latin), Greek, Phoenician, Arabic (which makes a fair number of everyday household words), proto-Germanic languages, Latin cultisms from the Renaissance, modern languages from English to German, French or Italian, Nahuatl, several languages from American natives, the usual loanwords from Asian languages, and, of course, a fair sprinkling of Romani for your vernacular. American speakers of Spanish have, of course, many other loanwords from native languages that didn't pass the ocean to Spain. So, eh.

Blow *up*, not out. See what I mean?

English is *easy*.

Okay, I admit I'm not a linguist, but I'm calling you on this. No fucking way is English easy, and that's not why it's used or why it's universal.

Perhaps you larked through learning English through some combination of talent and opportunity (and good teaching, and a language that is relative close to English), and became fluent with ease and grace, but having taught English, I'm familiar with the majority of students who do not, in fact, consider English easy, and a great number of textbooks, fellow English teachers, and studies that back me up.

No language is easy, and I'm not going to get into a whole German-is-harder/easier battle, or produce friends to "prove" how easy German really is. Even as a native English speaker, moving between English-speaking cultures requires a significant readjustment and language acquisition. Between that, and ample evidence that professional language users (journalists, writers, copy editors) make unintentional double entendres or errors, it's not fair to characterize a language as easy.

Perhaps you larked through learning English through some combination of talent and opportunity (and good teaching, and a language that is relative close to English)

I mentioned before that I'm Spanish. Spanish is a Romance language, English is a West Germanic one :P

And as a matter of fact, second and third languages are obligatory subjects at schools here. At school I did English and French, at high school English and German while I got an official degree in English at the language school, plus one year of Latin (I did the technical bachillerato, but the people who chose the humanities course had to do Latin and/or Greek). But after a certain level I got fluent in English by reading a lot of books and posting at web boards... so yeah.

Even as a native English speaker, moving between English-speaking cultures requires a significant readjustment and language acquisition. Between that, and ample evidence that professional language users (journalists, writers, copy editors) make unintentional double entendres or errors, it’s not fair to characterize a language as easy.

That happens to other languages, too. Vernacular versions of Castilian Spanish and, say, Mexican Spanish can be nearly uncomprehensible to one another (e.g. "mola mazo" vs. "qué chido", plus the pitfalls of using words that are perfectly innocent in Spain like "coger" but are obscene in Mexico), Swiss German has ortographical rules that are different from the rules for the German spoken in Germany or Austria, only very recently the Portuguese and the Brazilians have agreed on a common ortographical standard, and let's not begin talking about Mandarin vs. Cantonese vs. Shanghainese and the other languages spoken in China.

Seriously, non-English languages are difficult and complicated, too. It's just that your ESL students have been familiar with them from birth and have studied them for a lot longer than they've been studying English.

Seriously, non-English languages are difficult and complicated, too.

. . . and I never said otherwise. I have never said "Every language but English is simple and easy and has no nuance." I have spoken of English as a difficult, complex language chock full of idiom, slang, borrowed words, and cultural changes.

I did say, in my first post, that I thought the idiom/slang content, was higher than other languages, but you helpfully told me that I didn't know what I was talking about. Which is, as I said, fair enough, so I stopped making comparative statements.

I can see why you'd think that I'm continuing to make comparative statements, but I'm not, and it's stifling whatever civil conversation we can have because you're not really addressing my points.

And on the one comparative note I made, you didn't read it that way. Spanish is relatively close to English. Not as close as German, but a far cry closer than Chinese, Korean, Thai, Japanese, or Ojibwe. (Perhaps I should have been more specific.)

I'm going to stop following the thread now, I think, as it's incredibly frustrating to re-couch my words and have them ignored/twisted repeatedly. I feel like your experience (as a single student/academic) is given way more weight than mine (as a student and a teacher and someone who has worked with a wide variety of students from lots of different lingual backgrounds, including Spanish speakers). Which is fair, but frustrating, since there's no explanation, only pronouncements. No studies, no theory, not even a wiki link.

"and let’s not begin talking about Mandarin vs. Cantonese vs. Shanghainese and the other languages spoken in China."

I wholeheartedly agree. And besides, within a few short years China will be the country with the largest English speaking population in the world.

Okay then. I should have mentioned that learning any foreign language isn't easy by itself, and most people have trouble doing so, but, in my experience (and the plural of experience isn't data), English has been the easiest one to learn.

German has the worst bits of English (phrasal and irregular verbs), French (haben vs. sein work a lot like avoir and être) and Latin (cases and declinations), and Japanese is completely unrelated to European languages, mixes original Japanese vocabulary with irregularly adapted Chinese loanwords, and you also have to learn one thousand and a half kanji (many with several different ways to pronounce them depending on their position as standalone words or Chinese-derived compounds) as a bonus... it works both ways, you see.

Just today, I was looking through a cookbook I bought recently that is British but tries to pretend it is American (even going so far as to refer to America as "here" even though all of the American terms for ingredients are in parentheses after the non-parenthesied British term). The line under one recipe name said something about how easy the recipe was for even the youngest cooks to "knock up". I found that quite funny.

The other day, my mother-in-law (who's only language is English) was talking about the president who caught pneumonia shortly after being inaugurated, except she said that he "caught ammonia". Again, we all laughed.

I don't really see my two examples as any different than the ones above.

One thing to consider is that these are companies and organizations that are making the mistakes. People are not laughing at individuals so much, though it may create a feeling that allows such bullying. I currently live in Japan and am constantly coming across very strange English some time published by very reputable companies. I am always perplexed as to how these mistakes make it past editors.