RE: Idiotic Tech Writing Prize

["Brian Henderson" <brian-henderson -at- cox -dot- net>]

And MY favorite instruction was in a set of cheap steak knives from Indonesia. It was just a little strip of paper that said,
"Caution: Do not leave knives in children."

Generally good advice, it seems to me.

-Brian Henderson

-----Original Message----- From: Richard L Hamilton

My favorite falls into the category of bad translations.
While traveling in China, I saw a hot air hand dryer in
a men's room with the following text in English:

#*$& the hand machine

The expurgated text is in fact the in"f"amous word you
might have guessed it was.

According to a native speaker of Chinese, the character
for "dry" in Chinese ("gan"), when simplified (as the
People's Republic does to many characters), looks like
a character used in the Taiwanese dialect as slang for
#*$&. Hence, "gan so ji" or "Dry the hand machine" (itself
clunky, but otherwise uninteresting) becomes much more
notable.

Though this might have been an honest mistake, the
connection with Taiwan makes me wonder if it wasn't
a "plausibly deniable" political statement by the
translator.

Richard Hamilton
Managing Writers: A Real World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation
http://xmlpress.net/managingwriters.html



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ComponentOne Doc-To-Help 2009 is your all-in-one authoring and publishing 
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Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
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