Friday, October 15, 2010

from: Rok P.
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 2:07 AM
subject: tattoo translation

Hey,

any chance you could translate what my sister just got tattooed on her neck?

It's supposed to be something in the lines of "as long as I breathe, I hope"

Thank you,

Rok

13102010

The five characters do not have same poetic meaning as she hoped. Rather, they are "living", "air", & "love".


Cracked.com recently had an article titled "5 Examples of Americans Thinking Foreign People Are Magic", and its intro to #2 was:

You know how it's been trendy for a while for white Americans to get Chinese or Japanese characters -- sorry, "Hanzi" or "Kanji" -- as tattoos? The idea seems to be that if you get the English words "STRONG" or "BEAUTIFUL" tattooed on your arm, you look like a bragging retard, but if you get it in Japanese, it is suddenly meaningful.

3 comments:

  1. Why do they never think to check out what the characters mean until 10 minutes after they leave the tattoo parlor?

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  2. I think this is not so bad, at least having the characters "Life, Breath, Love" on your back are not as horrid as some mistakes we've seen on here and in real life...

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  3. that's very true, but still, she could have ended up with 笨蛋 and those would have been correct too, since she had NO IDEA what she was really getting written on her. *sigh*

    ReplyDelete