Interesting English signs in Korea

Before I get started, I must stress that my point is not to make fun of Koreans here, since the French are notoriously bad at English. And as I wrote in my first post on this blog, I think a lot of Koreans are better at English than they think. The other day, I went to the pharmacy to get some pills. When she saw me, the clerk was visibly unhappy that she would have to serve me. I spoke broken Korean, and everything went on smoothly, until she said something I didn't get. So she immediately switched to English and said "two tablets a day". In France, you should expect something like "errrr, ze...errr medicine is errrr....two time in ze day..." That's if you're lucky.

A lot of signs, ads, or posters in Korea are in English, which is cool. But there are also a lot of mistakes, and sometimes the actual message doesn't come across. Again, this is not only in Korea, you can also see this in France (only less often maybe). Take a look at this picture, which I found on this site:

They mixed up "foreign" and "stranger" to translate "étranger", that's a classic

You can even find typos or mistranslations in English speaking countries. This picture was taken on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles.

It's a French word used in English, but it should definitely be spelled "souvenirs"

I found the next one in a Korean supermarket in San Diego. I assume translating "수정과" into "cinnamon punch" is correct, but as for the translation into French ("poinçon de cannelle"), there's no punch to it, so to say. 😉

"poinçon" is this kind of punch, not the kind you can drink

Anyways, I have observed a lot of similar mistakes in Korea, some of which are just typos or spelling mistakes:

convEnience, maybe?

Not sure what "inforantion", "inconvienience", and "woring" mean...

Sometimes a mistake can slightly alter the meaning of the sign.  I saw this one in Busan. It reads "no sacking", which reminded me of the French far left parties that want to ban layoffs. But the original idea was simply "no stacking" (I'm not quite sure why though), as Her confirmed after reading the sign in Korean .

Then come the so-called translations that are just plain gobbledygook, like this sign in a restaurant in Haeundae (Busan). My impression is that this wasn't even done by a human, and the person who ordered it didn't speak a word of English, so they didn't realize it didn't make sense.

???

It's true that, for now,  Korean-English and English-Korean translation tools are missing the mark. Probably because these two languages are so different, as I came to learn in my everyday life here. Google Translate has not even been able to translate 수정과 when I needed it to write this post today. 

About automatic translation, I have recently dicovered Deepl Translator, a translation service using AI which blew me away when I tried to translate texts from English into French and vice versa. A few years ago The New York Times put  several automatic translation services to the test and compared the human translation of a passage from St Exupéry's "Le Petit Prince" with computerized translations from Google and two competitors. At the time, the human translator did the best job, by far. Well, today, Deepl Translator can translate that same passage almost flawlessly (I tried it, and there was actually one big mistake, the rest was pretty close to what the human translator had come up with). Unfortunately Deepl doesn't do Korean, at least not yet. When it does, things will be much easier for me, and maybe such incoherent signs will disappear too.

 

Pretty good, huh?

Speaking of incoherence, there's another kind of English signs that I have seen a lot in Korea, especially in cafés like the ones I have mentioned in this post. You can very often see long English sentences on the walls, which are not incorrect but don't mean much. It's like a juxtaposition of English words arranged a "sentence" whose meaning remains quite obscure to me. And I really wish I knew why they're doing that.

But at least the grammar in this "sentence" seems to be correct. It isn't the case in the following picture taken near Seoul station. I can't understand why no one had an English speaker check this sentence before ...

It should be "not all smoothies are..." shouldn't it?

Last but not least, my favorite one is this shop in Nampo-dong (Busan). Probably not an English mistake per se, but I can't help smiling whenever I walk past this shop.

This seems rather fishy...