The Case of the Mistranslated Tattoo

hey what up this video is going to talk
briefly about one amusing case of an incorrectly translated tattoo and then I'm going to speak briefly on my experience with translations of tattoos and some other languages because I've studied so many different languages and I've lived in so many odd parts of the world if I look strange in this video it's because this is me filming without natural light I'm filming this at night so like one half of my face is going to look bright pink and the other half is gonna look bright blue it's gonna look terrible that's all right this ain't a beauty contest so I I got an offended response here on YouTube from a guy whom I was trying to help out by alerting him to the fact that his Chinese tattoo did not say what he thought it said now this is a bit of a cultural phenomenon there's a blog called handsy s'matter Hanzus matter but anyway I'll have to spill out that link for you guys to find it probably but there were different websites that collect examples of people who pay for a tattoo and they asked for one thing but got another thing and whenever there's a language barrier involved things can go horribly wrong with tattoos and this is especially common these days with both Chinese and Japanese now I have a colleague who works on Sanskrit and Sanskrit also has its own kind of hilarious stories and hilarious websites devoted to this subject of people who don't know the language paying money to get a tattoo in the language because they think it has some special symbolic significance or what have you so anyway the situation just a couple days ago was that this guy had an image of himself up with this Chinese tattoo and the thing isn't that it made no sense at all it looked like it was trying to make sense that's often the case with a mistranslation singing I was he trying to say like a hundred percent like I'm a hundred percent or I'm gonna go I'm gonna give it a hundred or I want a hundred what you know what was the tattoo trying to get at and anyway so road to the guy said look but you know or was it that he was trying to phonetically get the name of the country Brazil like what you know you're just thinking through these different possibilities or you know is it an idiom but they only gave him half of the phrase and not the you know like a four character idiom so you're just thinking of these different possibilities and also I gotta say um I do not speak Chinese fluently at all I am a level one student of Chinese but I'm a student who has an unusually technical approach to the language so in terms of the graphical elements that make up characters water called the system of radicals I have more of an education that than most people including some some fluent speakers who have known but anyway I there are no false claims to confidence in this but was looking at his tattoo and just looking up in the dictionary and I wrote to one Chinese friend of mine and said look you know can you make sense out of it anyway and then i wrote the guy on facebook and he wrote back at first for the comment that basically indicated he doesn't care what it really says he's happy with the tattoo and that's that well yeah you know but i'm trying to figure it out and I had some more suggestions like this like we thinking about the country Brazil was it this thing was that thing and he then sent me a link to a video in which he tells the whole story of how he got this tattoo his parents went to Hong Kong and they were told a certain story about this that this was the meaning of this is the sound and you know feel bad for the guy but what his parents were told was a hundred percent wrong what they were told but the meaning of the Chinese characters was wrong and also what they were told about the sound the phonetic significance of the characters was false so I wrote back to tell Nancy look I'm sorry to tell you but what you've got written on your skin doesn't make sense in any language and the sound isn't what you think it is and I said but the good news is the actual characters used they can be transformed to make another phrase that make sense you know so when you talk about making a cover-up tattoo you could add some words after it or some words before it you could figure something out and this is the part he really misunderstood I was trying to explain to him that one of the characters he has is pretty much meaningless modern Chinese but it is used phonetically for certain types of foreign sounds so the example I gave him and he misunderstood this and this is maybe why so set I said look you knows this is a phonetic symbol and it's in the Chinese word for fascism now he has misremembered this in his mind gotten confused he thought I was warning him that his tattoo actually had the meaning fascism but no it was an example of one of the foreign sound so you know this kind of sound in fascism they choose to transcribe that into Chinese with this symbol so they use it in a number of other words that have nothing in common in terms of meaning it's just phonetic it's in the name of the country Pakistan as Pakistan is written into Chinese so there there's an STC on Pakistan and for whatever reason they chose to use the symbol in transcribing transcribing that sound um so look I understand the guy felt offended as heartbroken it's overstating it say yeah that's our program but I understand he felt frustrated with me because I was the bringer of bad news in telling him that his tattoo does not mean what he thinks it means but of course the other hand he's also playing with a little bit of cognitive dissonance because he's saying repeatedly that he doesn't care about what the tattoo means objectively he only cares about what it means to him subjectively so look that's all I can do for you I looked it up in the dictionary because I found an interesting I asked one Chinese friend about it I tried to figure out what it meant I tried to warn you but both what it means and what it sounds like the meaning is not linked to fascism that's just an example of how the character is now used in modern Chinese because it is mostly used as a phonetic character not for its meaning so hey it is what it is look Chinese is in some ways the last and the least of the languages of studied there were no false claims about my level of ability in Chinese on this youtube channel on my blog in any of my publication you can look through what I've managed to do living around Chinese in and around the Chinese language but you know poly is the ancient scriptural language used for terrell out of buddhism and i had a lot of experiences and encountering people who sometimes had tattoos that were incorrect that we're trying to evoke the cultural history of tera vaada Buddhism but then also sometimes you meet people at tattoos that were completely correct but you'd wonder man what does this mean to you I bumped into a French guy on the banks of the Mekong River and he had an elaborate traditional Cambodian poly tattoo a full magical diagram tattoo that went right up to his neck and covered his whole upper chest CZ elaborate little magical squiggles that are broken pally they're written in this language I studied and like I can't say it's incorrect he went to a tattoo artist who really is part of that tradition but like this guy I you know I talked him for a little bit he's not a Buddhist he doesn't believe in this stuff he doesn't understand what symbols means and like you're going to job interviews with this written on your neck whoa you know that blows my mind however in his case when you get a tattoo in an obscure language whether that's Cambodian or pally or in this case a combination of Cambodian and pally to understand that that's who you need to both no written Cambodian and the underlying language pally he's not going to bump into a lot of people who know what his tattoo means any better than he does there are millions and millions of people by contrast who can read the chinese language all over the world so if you've got a tattoo in chinese that doesn't make sense it means something you don't think it means it's a problem and you know if you feel that you're happy with your tattoo and you don't want to change it that's one thing in terms of how Chinese people will regard you or anyone with a little bit of an education Chinese which includes me I'm level one as a Chinese student to just half a step up from level zero let me tell you but just with the bits and piece of the language I know from the work I've done when I see that tattoo right away i'm picking what so you got to think about that side of it too um not everything in life is dream and you can imagine how you might react if you met someone who had something you had a large prominent tattoo that was written in English but the English didn't quite make sense and the more you looked at it the less sense it made and you then asked a friend does that say what I think it says is what it is