Mistranslation

In China, the rush to provide English versions of signs runs far ahead of available English speakers to make sure the meanings are correct. People that do not know much if any English consult dictionaries and guess. The results can be hilarious. Consider the picture at the right, from a hotel room in China. The Chinese character means pull which is obviously the intended meaning. So why does the English version read "Latin America"? The answer is simple. You consult a Chinese dictionary on how to translate 拉 into English. The first entry says "pull". but another entry says that it's an abbreviation of "Latin America" because the sound of the first syllable is the same. See more information about this here.

Franco's Ghosts

On Sunday, I heard the episode CBC Radio's program Writers & Company called "Franco's Ghosts Part 5" which concerns, in part, the writer Najat El Hachmi, who was born in Morocco, but grew up in Barcelona, and became a Catalan-language writer. Her native language is Amazic of which I know little or nothing.

So I decided to learn something about this (presumably) Berber [North African] language. I put "Amazic" into Google, and the following page turned up at the top of the list:http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berber

This page is part of Viquipèdia, Wikipedia in another language, but which language?

The first paragraph runs as follows:

La llengua berber, llengua amaziga^[1][2], amazigh o tamazight és un conjunt de parlars del nord d'Àfrica, de la família afroasiàtica ocamitosemites. La parlen uns 12 milions de persones (berbers), principalment al Marroc, però també a Burkina Faso i, en petites "illes", fins aEgipte. El guanxe canari també és considerat un dialecte del berber. El nom "berber" té el mateix origen que la paraula bàrbar; per això els berbers demanen que s'anomeni al seu idioma tamazight, com ells en diuen

In looking at these paragraphs and indeed the whole article, the singular thing was that even though I couldn't even certainly identify the language (at first), I could by analogy to evident similarities to other languages I know (French, Spanish, Italian) guess the meanings, not perfectly of course, but not bad for my first attempt to read a new language -- which turns out to be Catalan.