A colleague dropped a photo into our group chat: a sign outside a public toilet in France, with a Chinese line reading free tungsten carbide. The original was WC gratuit, and WC also happens to be the chemical symbol group for tungsten carbide. The machine duly consulted the periodic table and turned a helpful notice into a phrase no one could parse. We laughed for half an hour, and then someone quietly filed the image away in the training material for new joiners — because this trade meets the same joke every few years, with the dictionary replaced by a translation engine.
Most of what follows comes from published translators' memoirs, newspaper collections of translation anecdotes and press reports on signage seen in the street. The dates vary widely; the mechanisms have not aged at all. Once you have laughed, it is worth asking whether the same trap is waiting in today's documents.
1. Signs in the street: machines excel at turning common sense into trivia
A correspondent based in France once collected a set of photographs of Chinese produced by translation tools. One restaurant menu rendered starter plus main course as startup plus main curriculum; another, intending to say a Chinese menu is available, posted the menu is in China. A supermarket turned foie gras into fatty liver. A hair salon in Nantes offered to chisel hair instead of cutting it. A currency exchange translated commission as committee. And on a large display in central Paris carrying welcome in many languages, the Chinese version alone said goodbye.
The mechanisms are clear enough: a polysemous word takes its most frequent sense, an abbreviation is expanded in the wrong field, and a proper name receives no domain check. Today, when product labels, shop notices and storefront pages are produced in bulk, the same trap repeats faster and far more uniformly without a locked term list. A person makes scattered mistakes; a machine makes them in batches.
2. Idioms and classical Chinese are where literal translation does the most damage
A Shanghai newspaper of the early Republican era rendered a writer galloping across the literary scene as he often gallops on his writing desk. During Sino-Soviet exchanges in the 1950s, an interpreter pressed for time turned the idiom about having a ready plan into there is a stick in my stomach; according to a newspaper collection of anecdotes, the Soviet side became quite concerned and asked why he had not been taken to hospital. Another translator put the main street in a classic opera aria onto a highway, and turned the affectionate third young gentleman into my third husband.
Such errors are usually blamed on weak foreign languages, but what is missing is shared background: speaker and listener know the same references, and that background does not exist in the translation. The safe move is not to hunt for a prettier word but to decide whether the image should be kept at all. In certificates, contracts and manuals it is normally replaced by a functional description; only literary and brand copy can consider keeping it with a note.
3. One wrong word sends academic terms and slogans off course
The translator and scholar Ge Ge gave several real examples in the China Reading Weekly. In a biography of Niels Bohr, Proceedings — the journal in which the paper appeared — was casually rendered as forward by a translator who did not know the term. In the same book, Bohr's coat-of-arms, designed after he was knighted and bearing a taiji diagram, lost its second half and became a Taoist robe with a taiji diagram on it. He also described a translator who, rather than look up an unfamiliar foreign name in a dictionary, guessed from a similar spelling and quietly changed the subject's identity altogether. Advertising supplies its own classics: a pen maker's claim that its product does not leak became something entirely unrelated in Spanish and the selling point evaporated, while a soft drink's refreshing promise came out in German as being raised from the dead, leaving readers shaking their heads.
These correspond to the most expensive class of error today: domain terms and proper names. Proceedings is a journal title in a publishing context, coat-of-arms is a fixed term in heraldry, and one adjective in a slogan carries an entire market behind it. A term list does not solve everything, but it turns check what this word means in this field into a process step instead of a matter of inspiration on the day.
4. In the interpreting booth, the joke detonates on the spot
Published memoirs of diplomatic interpreters contain livelier cases. One interpreter neatly rendered the Chinese saying about scallions and tofu — perfectly clear — as as clear as crystal, and was still pleased with it when the speaker asked the guest whether their country had tofu. Bound by his own wording, the interpreter asked whether the country produced crystal; the guest cheerfully said yes, and the follow-up question about northern versus southern tofu could no longer be handled. At a China-Russia consultation, an interpreter supplied by the Russian side rendered counter-terrorism as striking fear every time, so the Chinese delegation initially wondered why a drilling and well-digging project had come up.
Interpreters get no second pass, which is why experienced ones develop an instinct: when unsure, look for a constraint in the context. In an export control discussion, a list can only be a list; in a saying about scallions and tofu, tofu has to be food, not crystal. The advantage of written translation is precisely that there is time to run that context check once more.
5. What to keep after the laughter
Laid out together, the jokes boil down to five traps: a polysemous word given the wrong sense, an abbreviation expanded in the wrong field, a proper or institutional name left unchecked, a cultural gap left unhandled, and context unused for disambiguation. They translate into five unglamorous habits: lock the term list first, verify names against official sources, rewrite idioms by function, give the full form at an abbreviation's first appearance, and do one back-translation or native review before delivery.
There is also a version nobody laughs at. If free tungsten carbide turned up in the name field of a certificate, if 84 were heard as 48, or if a negative were rendered as a positive, the room would go quiet. The more fixed the fields and the more closely an authority checks them, the less room there is for context to guess — which is why, on document work, we would rather write plainly and keep the original in brackets. For the more serious channel changes in the industry, see After 400 cooperation intentions and 80 supporting events; for versions and filing dates, see When filing deadlines move forward. Next time you spot a sign that makes you laugh, take the photo — then check whether the same word is sitting in your own term list.