I know someone who has something tattooed on him: in Thai.
As in, it’s a phrase which says ‘in Thai’ in Thai. So when people ask him, what is that? He says ‘it’s in Thai’. They say yes, but what is it? ‘It’s ‘in Thai’’. Yes, but…
You get the idea.
Some guy came up to me when I first joined the military and told me “hey I got your name tattooed on my ass. Don’t believe me?”
Sure enough there was “YOUR NAME” tattooed on his ass check. I’m pretty sure he just liked showing people his ass.
Was it a nice ass at least?
It has to be if your name is on it
Sometimes, you put your name on the best ass you can get even if it’s not the best ass to put your name on.
Because your name is such dogshit that it makes everything around it nicer by comparison
It wasn’t plump, like how I prefer but I could see why some people would think his ass was nice. Being fit and young and all that.
I’m thinking that’s a combination of a lost bet and some cleverness.
Either it’s just a thing round here or that person is my childhood friend’s cousin. Their grandma wasn’t happy about getting got
Is your friend Steve-O?
I have a tattoo that means “I don’t know, I don’t speak japanese.” It works when an English speaker asks me what it means, and it also worked with the Japanese when I lived in Japan and didn’t speak the language.
This is like setting your guest WiFi password to “It’s on the wall over there.”
My lord, just show a QR code from your settings, then!
I knew a barista that set the wifi pass to “ten bucks”.
My sister’s first year in college she got the Chinese word for LOVE tattooed. Later she found out it was the correct symbol, only mirrored. I called her EVOL for a while
Who’s on first?
Trolling level expert 😂
Tattooing yourself for the bit is next-level.
A buddy of mine got “OUCH” on the inside of his lip. Ironically, it hurt a lot less than the piece on his shin.
That’s the kind of stupid I like.
In high school there was a Chinese girl who hung out with us. We were at at an arcade after school one day, and this guy comes up to her. She’s 16. He’s 40. He says something like “Hey baby, check this out!”
He takes off his shirt to reveal a not at all impressive body. But his chest had something tattood on it in Chinese.
She goes wide eyed, and runs off. When we caught up to her (obviously without the guy) she’s having trouble breathing, because she’s giggling so hard. Just try to visualize that. It’s not a belly laugh, it’s a giggle, but she’s giggling so hard she’s wheezing.
Now she spoke full perfect english, and only had a slight barely noticable accient. But when we asked her what was so funny, she went full stereotype Chinese voice from how amused she was at the tattoo.
“His chest…it say ASSHOOOOEEEE!!!” (She was saying asshole, but I typed it phonetically how she said it, and with the enthusiasm she said it).
She just burried her face in her hands, and had the biggest giggle fit I’ve ever seen. She later said “He must have been an asshole to the tattoo artist. He’ll never know!”
宫保鸡丁
kung pao chicken.
he thought it was super funny, like he was in on the joke.
I mean considering the fact that he flashed himself to a 16 year old girl without any warning, I’d say that tattoo was well deserved.
I knew a guy who had “bad to the bone” written on his neck in Chinese. The problem is, the phrase doesn’t translate at all.
So, his tattoo read as “my bones are bad”
Tbf, he was a clown and had something like that coming.
Now the day I was born The nurses all gathered 'round And they gazed in wide wonder At the horror they had found The head nurse spoke up Said, “Leave this one for dead” She could tell right away That my bones were bad
My bones are bad My bones are bad B-B-B-B-Bad B-B-B-B-Bad B-B-B-B-Bad
My bones are bad
Newlines only work properly if the previous line ends in two spaces btw (or if there are two newlines)
When Mr. Glass decided to get a music career.
Mine is similar. On my forearm,not my neck (yuck). It’s supposed to be “blood and guts”. Literal translation equals something about “inside organs”.
I’m okay with that. If you actually discuss the meaning of it works out fine.
I got that tattoo because I actually work with “blood and guts” as a Paramedic.
I guess you also sometimes with with inside organs
Unfortunately, true.
Not his fault, that’s just a mean or ignorant tatooist. Why wouldn’t they just do a literal word for word translation if there’s no equivalent phrase in Chinese?
Like if the phrase “great to the neck” has some special meaning in Chinese but not English, you can still write the english words “great to the neck” on someone’s skin.
Unfortunately, I can’t read the language it was written in and I can only go with the people we knew and met who could.
Ehm… isn’t “日本” = “Japan” both in chinese and japanese?
Thats what google translate is telling me anyway
Yes.
Username checks out so I trust this commenter with my life right now.
The subtitle could have been not literal translation. The dialogue could have been “this is kanji for japan” or characters for japan. But the subtitle wrote Chinese for japan, because the movie/speaker was Chinese… Maybe
That’s actually hilarious.
Not the first time I’ve Lemmied this story, and it’s not a tattoo it’s a motorcycle decal. Kid turns up on a Kawasaki forum to show off his Ninja’s paint scheme, and on the front cowling are five kanji figures, the first and the third were identical. Someone asked “Why does your bike say ‘pig dog pig bird horse?’” He says “Nah man, it says N-I-N-J-A. That’s how you spell ‘Ninja’ in Japanese.”
Might be the seals to some high level jutsu.
I was thinking of getting 何か日本語で “nanika nihongo de” and if someone would ask me what it meant I’d say “something in Japanese”
I had a roommate that asked me for ideas for a tattoo and I told him to just get ‘Chinese Symbols’ written in all caps on him.
The amazing bastard did it.
well, I’ll bite. What’s it mean?
Literally “something in Japanese”
Something in Japanese
Yeah, but what exactly?
Something in Japanese! What’s on my back?
Dude! What does it say?
Sweet! What does mine say?
DUDE! What does mine say?
What doesn’t say anything, he’s on second.
No, What’s on second
Then who’s on first?
Yes.
Alright, I’ll bite. What’s it mean?
I’ve wanted to get Leviticus 19:18 tattooed on me somewhere prominently for years, but too many people would not get the joke and think I was religious.
I met someone with a “Man shall not lie with another man” tattoo.
-
That verse is literally the previous chapter to the “don’t get tattoos” verse. Why did he think one was important enough to get tattooed while ignoring the other?
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He really chose to get that tattooed?!
There was no way a conversation with this guy would go well, so I’m going to be stuck with these questions forever.
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Reading through various translations, the first part seems to say "don’t cut/gash your body in honor/memory/mourning of the dead, but most of the translations leave it somewhat ambiguous (at least to me) as to whether it means “don’t tattoo yourself in honor/memory/mourning of the dead” or just, “don’t tattoo yourself at all”. Also, it sounds as though cutting/gashing yourself for other reasons is isn’t breaking any rules.
Don’t ruin my good time.
Sorry, lol, that was definitely not my intention! I’ve definitely heard about the “no tattoos” thing before, especially for those following Judaism, but I’d never read the relevant text before, so it definitely surprised me. I may have to ask my sister about it, since that’s definitely her area of study.
I went out raging when i was younger and i met a girl and a tattoo artist and we got shitfaced together. At some point we wanted to get a dumb ass tattoo. We both had a lot of tattoos already, so it was just one for the collection. The artist was originally from japan, but he kept saying that his japanese isn’t that great. We still insisted on getting some japanese letters. He tattooed her what he thought: enjoyer of garlic bread translated to, and i wanted one that said garlic boy. We came up with it individually because we talked a lot about garlic bread and one of my favourite bands is garlic boys. And i thought it’s funny. She got her tattoo, but the guy was so fucked up that he fell into a coma after that. I didn’t get my garlic boy tattoo, and i thought to get it anyway, but it would never be as funny as getting it from a drunk japanese dude who spoke very bad japanese.
Hentai Gaijin
Also reminds me of this story of a guy who wanted to have his name tattooed in Japanese. His name is Gary. And in Japanese it’s written in Katakana like this ゲリ but Gary didn’t think that looked cool and wanted to have it written in Kanji. So the artist gave him a tattoo of 下痢 which is pronounced as geri. Which actually means diarrhea.
Not sure if it’s true but would be funny as hell if it was.
Geri is my favourite Indonesian crackers, but not so much the chocolate ones…
Should’ve been ゲーリー, not ゲリ. No wonder people got confused.
This would be perfect for me and my IBS-D
In Wales road signs are printed in both English and Welsh. When a new sign was being made someone sent the English part to a translator, who’s out of office message was in Welsh. They assumed that message was the translation and printed it on the sign.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mistranslated-welsh-traffic-sign/
Not a translation error but the worst tattoo I ever saw on someone was a guy with a bloody tampon tramp stamp.
bloody tampon tramp stamp
“bloody” as in bloody idiot, or “bloody” as in black pudding?
My guy. My dude. My man.
Do you know what a tampon is / does? You might be able to infer from that alone.
My man, my dude, my guy,
That is fuckin’ why it’s ambiguous.
Considering the specific context, that’s what makes it very not-so-ambiguous.
And I’m sure folks that identify a specific way would also agree.
Plus, the OP confirmed it. 🕵️♂️🕵️♀️
So I went looking to find out what you’re talking about, and I came up with nothing. So linky with the op comment confirming what they meant.
There are plenty of snarky things I could say. I refrain from being the ass I’d like, you haven’t proven to deserve it.
I was not at all trying to be snarky in any possible way. I guess I should have been more clear in saying what I really meant: women would probably understand this more clearly than others. My apologies if I seemed like I was trying to upset you in anyway. Tone is weird through text.
But here’s the confirmation: https://feddit.uk/comment/12718867
i think I was getting two different conversations mixed together, my snark was intended for someone else. i apologize for that.
Indeed 'twas a tampon with blood upon it
@glitchdx@lemmy.world here’s the OP confirmation
Alexa, what’s a tampon?
I assume this is one of them dual meanings
Given your job is a translator, why would you assume the person emailing you can understand Welsh? That one is entirely on the translator.
I remember seeing a FB post ages ago, of some dude saying that he went to Japan to tattoo “God is faithful” in Japanese because he didn’t trust local tattooists to write it right. The post was a photo of the tattoo on the dude’s arm.
Someone pointed that it said something along the lines of “idiot stranger”.
Mr “I went to Japan” complained that was impossible, because he went to Japan.
The other person posted a screenshot of the kanji on google translate and lo, “idiot stranger”
Even the premise: why would you want a Christian message in Japanese?
Some guesses: it looks cool, it makes people curious to ask “what’s that supposed to mean?”, the dude was a christian otaku
Didn’t you know the man on the cross was Jesus’s secret brother who was martyred in His name while Jesus fled to Japan, started a family, and died of old age?
Apparently Christianity is about 1.5% of the population, which is almost 2 million people. In some areas you can see signs on sheds talking about Jesus or life after death, etc. A friend of mine knew a local older lady who had one on her shed and asked her if she put it there and said that it just appeared one morning. She wasn’t Christian but thought a sign talking about god was kind of nice so she just left it up.
Guess if the local sect can’t convince people to hang signs they’re willing to do some guerrilla jesus-ing. This one says “Jesus is the son of god.”
Jesus is the son of god
I always hated this sentiment. I don’t think sons should automatically inherit their fathers’ sins. Jesus seemed to be a mostly cool dude, albeit with his own human flaws (including the common blindness to his father’s abusive nature) and it really doesn’t seem fair to lump him in with his dad.
I expected even more Christians in Japan but there is a difference between Christians in Japan who adopt Christian messages into the Japanese language and a Westerner (I assume) going to Japan to get a tattoo. If I want a Christian message tattooed, I would want it in a language I understand or maybe one that is significant for Christian culture like Latin or Old Greek or maybe Hebrew. But why in Japanese?
They were a big fan of Silence.
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As someone who went to Japan, yeah I’d expect that shit there more than in America honestly
I never tattooed it on myself, or anyone else, but I used to work at a local greasy spoon, and knew a Professor of English that came in regularly, who was originally from China. I asked him for the name specific characters that phonetically made up the syllables of my and my girlfriend’s names, he went to wait for his food, and came back with the characters he thought would work best. I used those to burn the characters into the weed stash box that she and I had made.
We told everyone that asked that we had no clue what it actually meant, it just sounded like our names.
But…what did it mean?
English names tend do just get characters that sound phonetically like their English pronunciation. As such, a lot of names, especially longer ones, don’t mean anything. If you directly translated them, a lot of the time you’d get like “cabbage the horse wheel” or something.
If you directly translated them, a lot of the time you’d get like “cabbage the horse wheel” or something.
That reminds me of the “Password Strength” comic by xkcd. All right, it’s settled. Next time I need new password, I’m feeding random names into a phonetic name translator.
So the characters are still words, right? As in not phonetics? Would it be like someone named Tristan getting the Spanish word Triste because it sounds like Tristan?
So the characters are still words, right?
Most likely yes. All characters in Chinese are defined jointly by the way it’s written, the pronunciation, and meaning. You can’t invent new characters like you would a new English word and have something that can be read out loud because there’s no system for deriving pronunciation from the written character itself.
I say most likely because there are still some characters that are phonetic in that their meaning is just the sound, but these don’t cover the whole spectrum of possible sounds in the language as far as I know. They also wouldn’t look as nice in tattoo form since they all use the same radical.
Tristán is a proper local name in Spanish
I’m aware, it was just the first English name and Spanish word I could think of that sounded similar for the example.
The Chinese English professor told me that my name meant something like “strong ox” and hers meant “beautiful lotus,” but I have no way to verify that, as I no longer have the box. She does.
Ooo may I have a guess - Daniel and Lilian?
edit - typo
Nope.
Ah nevermind then. Thought I got what the characters were haha
Upvote because I was sure you’d have it.
i would guess your name is John? “strong ox” seems 犟 to me(upper part is strong, bottom ox), beautiful lotus i got no idea.
Shawn actually. But that does seem similar to the character he gave me
You know it’s some ancient post because it had awards.
it’s old, because it has reddit silver, but it’s not that old, because it has reddit silver.
there are no awards on Reddit anymore ?
Unfortunately, it’s been dead for a couple of years now, but this blog used to translate everyone’s Asian-language tattoos.
A significant number of them use characters that are not from any language at all.
Quite a few that do have meanings are pretty funny, sometimes are quite ironic too.
https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/
Edit: I forgot about this, but it’s still on the front page of that blog and I laughed all over again.
Is this real?
Seems like it. I suppose it’s an honest mistake to make, she (or her PR team) put the Kanji for “seven” and “ring” (but also more generally means circular or loop or wheel), but Kanji when combined doesn’t always mean what you’d expect it to mean. In this case those two Kanji together is a noun meaning charcoal grill. Kanji combinations can be highly logical, where their standalone meanings come together to a very sensible combined meaning. But sometimes they don’t make much sense and the reasoning for the combined meaning is lost to time.
But come on, man… Just search for it online or open a dictionary before you permanently write something on your body.
It’s bit of both. 七輪 can mean seven rings, but more often it refers to the grill. Just as 五輪 can mean 5 rings, but it also means the olympics.
That is actually the same thing.
I want “pretty nice and vanilla guy” tattooed on me, and I’ll say it means “horrible pervert”
I bestow upon you the title of 凡人 (bonjin), in Japanese means an unremarkably mediocre person. You can tattoo it and tell people it means psychopath instead of course, who’s stopping you?
remarkably mediocre. give them an iq test and they’d get exactly 100
Well that’s fairly interesting
remarkably so
The Flynn effect makes that a time sensitive achievement
Don’t leave out the part about your omniscience
I was in line behind someone who had 安 on her nape. I’m guessing she was going for a meaning of like peaceful or restful or something along those lines but you need a compound like 安心 or 安静 for that.
The character alone means more like cheap, at least in Japanese. Maybe it’s different in Chinese.
In Chinese, 安 by itself can mean secure. I think.
edit: it can also be a surname. but still seems a bit strange to me to have that character by itself.
Yep, Chinese like to use single character to mean something, but the word generally have positive meaning so it’s used in name as well. Though i’m not sure if it’s surname, never heard anyone with that name, given name though yeah.
I’ve met someone with that surname. Although it definitely isn’t a very common one.
