Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Tiger Tie by Burton

Andy from UK has purchased this tie from Burton sometime ago when he needed one. While the tie is often covered by the jacket, Andy has always assumed the Chinese characters had something to do with tiger.



After seeing my site, he started to have doubts about his original assumption and wanted to know just exactly what Burton is putting on their products.

I personally have never seen tiger been described in such way ; but what I can tell is four out of the seven characters are written incorrectly.

My guess is these are random characters chosen to be used as marketing tools.


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Sunday, March 26, 2006

The Stubborn Italian

About a week ago, I got an email from an Italian named Giacomo Polonijo asking for translation help. He wanted to get a tattoo of three words “Consciousness, Coherence, Balance” and hoping I could verify the translation for him.

Two days later, he sent me the design he is planning to use.



I was horrified by the poor penmanship as well as the missing partials in the characters; I informed him that whoever designed his tattoo probably only had primary school education in Chinese or Japanese.

To illustrate my point, I attached the correct characters (written in red) back to him for comparison.

In an immediate follow-up email, I strongly urge him not to get the characters tattooed.

Unfortunately, I have the feeling that he is too stubborn to take my advice seriously.

C’est la vie.


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Ease of Gas Retention

From Brazil, reader Joao (a long time Japanese student) sent in a photo of this young man proudly displaying his cool tattoo at a party.



Besides the fact the characters are poorly written, the true meaning of the tattoo may not be as what the owner intended.

(air, gas, steam, vapor; spirit), (stop, halt, desist; detain), (peaceful, quiet; happy, healthy), could be interpreted as “ease of gas retention”.

Perhaps this is some kind of viral ad campaign by makers of gas-relief medications?


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Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Sunday, March 19, 2006

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Downloadable Gibberish Asian Fonts

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New York Times and Tattoo Choices

I just finished my interview with Cindy Chang of New York Times last night. I thought it went pretty well.

We discussed about the phenomenon of tattoos/body modifications and how Western companies trying to break into the Chinese market with mistranslated slogans. My friend Jeremy Goldkorn’s Danwei.org and Andy Chuang’s Goodcharacters.com both have a few examples.

Cindy would also like to hear more from Hanzi Smatter’s readers’ perspective. If you would like to voice your opinion, please let me know via email , and I will forward Cindy your contact information.



Soon after my interview, I got this email this morning from Valen Farcas.

gmail - tattoo choices
(transcript)

Farcas is “bothered” by the fact that many of my entries are too sarcastic and I should “think a little self-restrain would do a great deal instead of a minute and a half of laughter.”

He/she is also unhappy about my “obsession with trying to make YOUR native language so exotic and exciting by denying people of its uses with the explanation that it has nothing to do with their culture and nature, so what?”

I truly enjoy and welcome comments like this since I believe strongly in “check-and-balance”. But if Farcas really want to call me an “elitist”, why bother with sugarcoating it with “your [awesome] blog”?


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Friday, March 10, 2006

"Skin, Hair, Body"


http://www.bmezine.com/tattoo/A60307/high/bmepb236775.jpg

This tattoo
was shown in March 7th of BMEzine’s kanji gallery without any caption.

The first character (leather, skin) and last character (body) are done correctly. I am having trouble on deciding if the owner wanted (capitol of Anhui province) or (hair, milli-) in the center.

As of right now, I think it should be , which means “skin, hair, body”.

In a previous post, owner of a claims she was told it meant “carpe diem”, which is wrong.


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Interviews and Comics

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Wednesday, March 1, 2006

NBA Body Art - Tale of My Chinese Tattoo

SI20060306_NBA_chinesetattoos
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/players/02/28/tattoos0306/index.html

In the upcoming issue of Sports Illustrated, NBA players were interviewed about their Chinese tattoos.

When asked about why tattooing in Chinese, Marcus Camby replied: "I was into a lot of Chinese flicks, a lot of [kung fu] movies."

Jeff McInnis explains: "I got the dictionary and looked mine up. Some people don't know what theirs mean. They just get them because they look good."

What about Shawn Marion?

Update: An article in Chinese about NBA players' tattoos.


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