Furbland's Very Cool Mastodon™reposting with better alt
Patrick Vanhoucke@GroupNebula563 DeepL gives a correct translation: “The Foreign Nationals Working in China Permit System is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please be patient.”
@librarianbe I translated it myself in the alt text :P
@GroupNebula563 Yes, of course. What I meant to say is that if DeepL translates it correctly, how can it be mistranslated on the placard? I suppose they used a translation machine.
@librarianbe this image has been around for a good while, probably since before deepl became a thing. i presume it’s a human translator (and/or just some person on their team who could vaguely speak English and had a phrasebook lying around :P)
@GroupNebula563 That could explain it.
@librarianbe to be fair, as someone who is an expert on shanzhai stuff, I’ve seen far worse translations. the only mistake they *really* made here (besides simplifying the English version a bit) is using “for” in the “due to” sense instead of a more fitting word/phrase
abadidea@librarianbe @GroupNebula563 aside from the image being at least several years old, I think it’s hand translated. Using “for” to mean “due to” is a very “I know how to say biblioteca” mistake, and they made a judgment call to omit an entire clause because it’s not strictly necessary and they weren’t sure how to say it right.
@0xabad1dea @GroupNebula563 Now I had to look up what a “I know how to say biblioteca” mistake is. 😅
@librarianbe @GroupNebula563 ah, sorry, it’s a very American example — our Spanish classes aren’t very useful, effective or deep and it’s a stereotype that the only thing anyone remembers how to say is “where is the library?”
@0xabad1dea @GroupNebula563 I have been learning Spanish in Brussels (Belgium) for 10 years. The language of instruction has been Spanish from the very first lesson. And that pays off, because we never 'translate'. Another language of instruction would not have been possible, because the classes are very international.