There is no horsefly!!
One of the problems with living in another country and not knowing the language is not being able to read signs. A lot of things are pretty much universal, like WALK/DON’T WALK signs, but there are others that aren’t. Without knowing Japanese, you’d never guess what they meant if they only had text on them.
Fortunately for me, I live in a very residential area with a fair number of kids. Most of the younger ones probably don’t have a high reading comprehension level yet, so a lot of the signs have pictures.
Even I can understand pictures!
And that’s a good thing, because if I had to rely on automatically translated text I’d be screwed. Take this sign for instance:
See? Even without being able to read Japanese, I can tell it’s obviously a warning to stay out of a construction area.
But what if the sign didn’t have a picture?
Well, I could guess from the red text and double exclamation points that it’s some sort of warning, but what’s it about?
Like many internet users, when I need to find out what something in another language means, I turn to the fish.
Altavista’s Babelfish is your one-stop online automatic translation resource. It’s handy, but not always as useful as it should be. It takes things on a word-by-word basis, and can’t look for context. It also tends to grab the first dictionary meaning it comes across, which can make things a bit muddled sometimes. In the case of my sign, the red text comes out as:
“There is no horsefly!!”
Excuse me?!? Is a lack of horseflies a bad thing? Are they some sort of good luck charm? Do they ward off runaway construction equipment? What do horseflies have to do with this sign?
The black text at the bottom makes a little more sense. Babelfish says it means:
“You do not have to idle here,”
Much better. At least from that, I can glean that it probably says, “Don’t play here.” But what if it was the top part that was right? Could the boy be remembering his tragic accident and be thinking, “oh, if only there had been a horsefly around on that fateful day! I’d have been spared this disfiguring injury and my family would not have to endure the shame I have brought upon us all! Why? Why was there no horsefly?!?”
Or maybe I’m just reading too deeply into things?