Earthquake sutras

Laird Brown and Phuntsok Dorjee are two of the organizers of the Air Jaldi summit in Dharamshala next month. Laird is visiting India, but lives in the West; Phuntsok is a Tibetan refugee and Dharamshala is his home. Laird says,

Today at lunch Phuntsok shared something interesting at the end of a conversation about earthquakes. The last major one in Dharamsala killed 40,000 people in 1905.

Situated around Dharamsala are four stupas. These house Buddhist relics and other items and are intended to appease the four calamities of fire, wind, rain, and earthquake. The stupas are located at Upper TCV, Sara, TIPA, and HHDL's private residence.

I learned that every morning and evening the children at TCV recite various sutras, among them a prayer to prevent an earthquake. Apparently there are monks at the major temples that only recite sutras to prevent earthquakes.

What a way for a child to start the day. If there ever were an earthquake here TCV would be the first to be leveled. The construction of many of these buildings is akin to a house of cards.

On my last visit to Dharamsala I was lying in bed when a tremendous earthquake rocked me for a full thirty seconds. The epicenter was in Kashmir and the destruction was appalling. The region still hasn't recovered.

The Tibetan oracles say that Dharamsala is safe from calamity. Maybe the prayers are working.

Open Source in Delhi

Open source technology expert Paul Jones recently traveled to Dharamshala, India, to visit with some of the same people and organizations featured in the NPR series "Hacking the Himalayas." In Delhi, "Owning the Future: Ideas and Their Role in the Digital Age" symposium. Here's one snip from his blog:

Driving around Delhi -- okay being driven around Delhi -- when I saw a large poster with a "copyright" symbol on it and the words "Creative Future." Turns out to be an advert for a contest sponsored by the Creative Future School of the the British Council; the award is a scholarship for creative business people under 35 in the fields of : advertising, architecture, crafts, designer fashion, film and video, interactive leisure software including computer games, music, performing arts - comedy, dance, theatre and the like, photography, publishing, radio, software, television, traditional Indian art forms, and visual arts.

Twenty young people with a business idea in the creative sector will be selected to take part in the Creative Future School at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore in August. There they'll learn how to structure their business proposition, develop their networking skills, understand what an investor is looking for and hear from successful creative entrepreneurs about how they have built their businesses. The faculty will include senior academics from IIMB, leading figures from creative businesses in India and the UK and other experts.

The contest is a sort of RockStar/Idol competition for young Indian entrepreneurs. Whilst all of the pursuits are creative, all of them are somehow restricted in their creativity by broad restrictive intellectual property laws. You will need Windows Media to appreciate part of the Creative Future site.

Link, and more here.

The shrimp fucks the cabbage: linguistic mystery solved

Following up on yesterday's post about China's crackdown on "Chingrish," or bad Chinese/English translations, BoingBoing reader Bin Sun points out the likely cause of the laff-worthy "X fucks Y" examples we've found:

In one of the links referenced in your post, i found a sign that reads

THE SHRIMP FUCKS THE CABBAGE

In chinese, this actually translates to "Stir-fried Dried Shrimp with Pak Choy [Ed. Note: aka 'bok choy,' a leafy vegetable]". Link to image.

And here is another: Image link.

The problem arises because in certain area of China (actually mainly across the strait in Taiwan first), "dry/dried" has the same pronounciation as "fuck" and shared the same character in the simplified Chinese -- they probably used babelfish to do a mechanical translation.

An anonymous BoingBoing reader says,

Language log investigated the "fuck" translation issue a few months ago: Link, Link 2.

In the second of those two links, a possible source for all these misplaced F-words on Chinese menus is identified: a bug in a popular translation software app, perhaps intentionally placed by a mischievous person.

As for "INDIVIDUAL TRAVEL DEPARTMENT OF TITS," the sign I found in Lhasa, Bin Sun explains:

TITS = Telecom International Travel Service, I think. (a subsidiary of Tibet Telecom, branching into travel business. you can see what is profitable in Tibet these day. it is not the lucrative telecom service in such a sparsely populated area) See this name card.

The Chinese words could be short form for: Tibet Telecom International Travel Service, or Tibet Telecom National Travel Service. I know how capitalism has transformed China's state business and was no surprise that a telecom company is running travel service. At first I thought of the latter and the abbrv didn't fit. So I googled the chinese and the namecard turned up.

The address on that "TITS" business card are the same coordinates of the place where I shot the photo -- Bin Sun is undoubtedly correct. Thanks!

Many readers wrote in to remind us of the excellent Engrish.com, where you can find similar examples of linguistic laffery.

Reader comment: sebFlyte says,

You reminded me of a fantastic piece of Chinglish I snapped in Guilin last summer: Link. It was on the inside of the door of the changing rooms in a clothes store, and is certainly advice worth heeding.

tian says,

Here are some more Engrish related material: 1, 2, 3. I also run a small site called Hanzi Smatter dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in the West.