When I was in Beijing, this was part of the many hilarious photos that I took home as e-souvenirs.
Talk about being totally non-PC man!
In this world where language is such a sensitive issue for so many people, everyone's always trying hard to be PC. Perhaps it's a matter of being sensitive to the feelings of those who are marginalised, or just about being careful about what we say.
And yet here we have it, in its full glory.
China's really the place to go to for your puzzling, non-related translations of individual words. Whether adjectives, nouns, or verbs, they have hilarious non-equivalents for nearly everything you might possibly think of.
Most dictionaries give the sense of "deformed" as:"twisted out of shape""contorted/distorted""misshapen/unshapely"(Merriam-Webster, New American Oxford, TheFreeDictionary)
So it becomes a case of knowing what contexts such an adjective should be used.
If the translators had knowledge of and did make use of a corpus, they would find that "deformed" usually collocates with notions like animals or children with mutated birth, or metal/sheet welding QC-failures, as shown by a Webcorp search for the term.
Given the picture on the sign, and knowing this from seeing it in other toilets here in Singapore, I guess the word they were really looking for is "Handicapped".
No comments:
Post a Comment