Translation fail

Getting the self service machines in McDonald’s to speak Japanese can have some interesting side effects…

Original size: https://i.imgur.com/6sBMTPB.jpg

Translation: Maxi McFirst chicken without tomatoes, fries, coke no ice, two earl grey teas, three egg McMuffins…

I had this one a few days ago:

Your picture wasn’t showing up for me, so I plucked it out of the page source: http://junk.toralar.net/images/receipt.jpg

Ah, that old chestnut.

We get that with our address (‘cos it has an accent). Basically it’s what fancy characters in UTF-8 look like when passed through something that has no idea about UTF-8 and treats them as literal characters.

Well, it looks like one of the world’s biggest international companies has difficulty doing international. ;-)

Still, it’s a mite better than Burger King. Much better burgers, but the automatic gizmo only does French and English, and the English has so many errors – should we accept “gratted cheese” on a burger?

The company I work for has some interesting extremely literal translations of things (“yellow of egg”). I offered to do it, wasn’t even interested in being paid anything extra. I’ve just seen one too many poorly translated Chinese instruction booklets.

But, alas, I don’t have BEPs and BACs and a dozen degrees in subjects like astropsychophysicology so I’m clearly not qualified to do the job. Sometimes people can be so dumb. I mean, who’s going to be better at English, somebody who did it as one of their languages at school/uni, or somebody who’s been speaking it for ~42 years? Well, whatever. Still says “yellow of egg” as well as some interesting avoidance – conservateurs in French are preservatives in English, but préservatif means something entirely different!

I think it was Paul Jennings (years before your time?) who pointed out the poetic possibilities of poor translations. He quoted a Japanese motoring manual that recommended tootle with vigour at approach of sportive dog . Yellow of egg is probably more intelligible than yolk statistically.

it’s what fancy characters in UTF-8 look like when passed through something that has no idea about UTF-8

The delightful term for this is mojibake.