Unfortunate Translations

As I wrote about before:

http://tainanchineseclass.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-is-chinese-hard.html

Chinese has several "romanizations", these are a coding of the Chinese sounds into the roman alphabet. There are lots of compromises with this method as the Chinese sounds don't translate one to one into English sounds. In fact, English sounds doesn't translate one to one into one sound for each English letter! In China and Taiwan only school children(or foreigners learning the language) actually use the romanizations. But for foreigners, signs are written using the romanizations and it's hard not to think about the pronunciation crutch as actual English words. This can lead to some funny, unintended results.

Like:

I suppose this law firm defended Cheech and Chong and were the model of restraint.

Or this one is clever, they worked backwards, they wanted to use the word Chiffon and chose their Chinese name "ShangFang" to match the English.

This one is truly unfortunate,

sex tourism is a big problem in Asia, but the sign isn't meant that way.

This one is just hard to understand what were they thinking:

This hair salon used no cutsy FCUK, just straight out.