Tag Archives: swearing

F*ck goods in china!

mistranslation of 'Gan' - chinese for 'Dry' and also 'Fuck'.

No, this isn’t an article advocating a more protectionaist policy regarding imports of goods from the PRC…

A friend pointed me to this article recently which gives a good explanation of one of the more infamous Chinese mistranslations.

(Spoiler : it boils down to the chinese symbol for ‘dry’ also meaning ‘fuck’ in certain contexts. contexts not well understood by translation software…)

The article is a nice crossroads between my interests of the Chinese language, profanity and technology. The content is a bit dry but some of the other translations might raise a smile.

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