Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Unincommunicado again

Went to get a new cellphone yesterday. One thing Alison has on hers that she figured I should get is a dictionary. Admittedly without spending $500 or more it's unlikely to get a dictionary that'll actually give the pronunciation for any of the words you find, but at least if you can translate from English into Chinese characters then you can look stuff up and wave your phone in someone's face in any dire situation that calls for it. It was pretty time-consuming because the display units are nonfunctional and it took the employees a while to run off to some mystery location and retrieve a real one each time we found something promising.

We looked at one LG phone that had a dictionary that wasn't as, say, standard as one typically expects dictionaries to be. Some entries would give you the translation to Chinese; some would just give the English pronunciation (and some arbitrary characters to approximate that pronunciation), and some had examples of usage. The first word we looked up was "hello" and it gave no translation, simply this example:

"Hello Mr. Cock, I have got a nice surprise for you."

I figured I'd be a little daring and looked up "fart" - only an example in this entry too:

"Stop ~ing around an behave yourself." [sic]

Sadly I ended up buying a different phone.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not buying that phone was clearly a mistake you'll regret at the next party you attend in Canada

Steele Malott said...

At $500, it's a pretty expensive party party party entertainer.

Steele Malott said...

I swear I only wrote party one time...
I don't know how to edit my post!!

grrrrr.

Steele Malott said...

oh... Owen just informed me that the crazy dictionary phone wasn't that expensive.
Don't mind me...

Anonymous said...

What is it with putting the word "cock" in translations? Cock on a beverage menu, I can understand and thus fully appreciate its hilarity. Mr. Cock?? Where the Hell does THAT come from??
I still laughed pretty hard though.
I was thinking that maybe they got some bored foreigner to contribute to the making of that dictionary.
SASHA (not anonymous)

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