The pure joy of bad translations
As Google Translate gets better, we’ll see fewer signs with badly translated English. Here is a celebration of some of the funniest signs I have seen.
3 min readDec 1, 2020
When I was an English teacher living in Japan, I came across some terrible English translations on shop signs and posters. Now that the country has the Olympics next year, I pray that they work harder on their advertising and their English skills.
While Japanese and Chinese people spend years studying the grammar of English in high school they rarely get to speak it and if they do, it’s with non-native speakers — which perhaps explains why there is so much bad English
In a way, this sign is correct. Is not every day ‘under construction’? You wake up in the morning, have a green tea, take a shower and then go about constructing a day that matters. This is a philosophical sign that makes me question myself and my whole being.