Last month we drew attention to the poorly-translated signs that can be found dotted around China's parks and public spaces. There are many 'tee hee' sites dedicated to highlighting these errors and there's nothing wrong with that, bad translations can be funny.

But wait, if the Asians can get our language wrong, could it be that Westerners do some pretty stupid things with the Asian languages?

The answer is undoubtedly YES!

It seems that people in the West can be equally foolish with the use of Chinese or Japanese characters. It's not uncommon to see Chinese and Japanese symbols plastered about on graphics on T-shirts, bags, websites and packaging. Unfortunately many of these 'graphics' appear quite ridiculous to a native speaker, but perhaps more worrying are the tattoos.

Chinese or Japanese character tattoos, known as Hanzi tattoos, are increasing in popularity in the UK. The problem is that most of the people getting the tattoos do not know what the characters actually say and neither do the tattoo artists. A case of the blind tattooing the blind drunk perhaps?

A recent press article in The Sun reported that a Vince Mattingley asked staff at his local Chinese takeaway to translate his name into Chinese for a tattoo. The waiter handed him a piece of paper with some Chinese characters pencilled on it and Vince faithfully 'branded' himself with them, only to find out 26 years later that the letters actually said Coca-Cola*.
*The Sun claimed it says Coca-Cola, in fact the tattoo says something more like "Crooked Official" - Ed

Vince is not the only person to have fallen victim to some dodgy Chinese characters (see what I did there, chortle).

Another pitiful story is of hairdresser Lee Becks, who believed he was having the words 'Love, honour and obey' etched onto his shoulder, only to find out the tattoo actually says 'At the end of the day, this an ugly boy'.

Arguably both cases were the result of cruel practical jokes. However, according to  hanzismatter.com , a site dedicated to the misuse of Asian characters in western culture, it seems many westerners are unwittingly brandishing intelligent phrases like 'this is a tattoo', 'fish ball soup' or 'real melon knows men' on their bodies while believing the message is saying something quite different. Hilarious for many Asians, but humiliating to say the least for these unfortunate bearers of misspelt misfortune.

The reason for this ambiguity of meaning lies in the fact that the Chinese language is based on ideographs or symbols and the meaning of each symbol will change depending on the symbols next to it and the context they are used in. The result when random characters are thrown together can be at best complete gibberish, and at worst could say something pretty awful. Not only that, as Japanese and Chinese actually share many characters, something that reads correctly in Japanese could mean something else in Chinese.

Example:

油断大敵 is a Japanese phrase that means "unpreparedness is one's greatest enemy" or "he that is too secure is not safe". This is a popular tattoo.

But in Chinese, it can be read as "lack of oil" or "oil crisis". 

It's fairly obvious that before permanently branding some part of your body with a translation, it's worth getting it checked.
But ultimately the moral of the story is, if you need an important translation, don't ask a Chinese waiter from Watford to do it for you.