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Translation Fails: WeChat Edition

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Language is one of the most interesting, beautifully complicated things that everyone in the world has the opportunity to experience.  Culture, language, understanding of self, and time are inextricably connected, and in order to really learn another language one basically has to completely change the way he thinks about himself, others, and the world. But languages are hard to learn (unless you've got some kind of crazy language-learning gift, which I'm totally not jealous of except I am), and usually it's just easier to go to a dictionary or the internet for a quick, direct translation from some other random language to your own.  They're handy, they're quick, and they're not usually very accurate, which can result in anything from frustrating communication breakdown to mass hilarity. Today's post is hopefully the latter. Most people already know how hilariously inaccurate Google Translate is sometimes (check out Malinda Kathleen Reese's YouTube...
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The Chinglish Gallery

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There are so many things I love about China: food, culture, history, landscape, cityscapes.  But so far I've been only posting about serious things, so today (like everyday, honestly) is a wonderful day to talk about the one thing in China that never fails to make me smile (and snort sometimes). In English, we call it "Chinglish."  Maybe there's a Chinese word for it - I don't know - but it basically just means that someone shoved some Chinese characters into Bing Translate and didn't bother to check if the English that came out actually made sense. Sometimes it's just unfortunate spelling errors. Sometimes you can figure out what they most likely were trying to say. Sometimes you got nothin'. Either way, it's super fun to see how two languages (Chinese and English, in this case) are so different that direct translation results in nothing less than pure shenanigans.  This post contains some of my absolute favorite examples of Chinglish th...
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Story Time: Prayers & Answers

Story Time! A while back a couple of coworkers and I decided to do something special for a friend's birthday, which for mei guo ren (Americans) often means going to a restaurant that serves Western food.  You can totally find almost any American "comfort food" here in China (peanut butter, Nutella, Frosted Flakes, Pringles, Heinz Ketchup, notice how my list is basically all junk food...), but it does come at a price.  An expensive price.  As such I often don't buy a lot of imported Western food (which is probably also better for my health as well as my bank account), but when it's a friend's birthday, hey, why not for one night? But I digress... This particular Western-style restaurant was actually run by some foreign friends, so it's not knock-off versions of hamburgers and fries.  That night we came in sort of late, so we were the only three customers there.  We were just flipping through the menu at our table when the restaurant own...
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