to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 11:16 AM
subject: Funny tattoo "Ride Hard Die Free"
Hi,
I stumbled across this tattoo online, and I haven't seen on your blog before. It is supposed to say "Ride Hard Die Free" but as you can see Google Translate made a creative interpretation of the phrase. I hope you enjoy it!
http://beckmansbruk.blogg.se/2010/january/7-e-januari-1.html
Thank you for a great blog!
Regards,
Gunnar
Grammatically speaking, this tattooed phrase is Chinese, however its translation back to English is far from "Ride Hard Die Free".
Granted, 免費 does mean "free of charge", 乘坐 does mean "riding, or being passenger", 硬 does mean "hard", but 模 or 硬模 is not verb for "die, or dying". Rather it is the noun "die" as in "die-casting" or "die-molding".
I guess this young man is quite proud and wants everyone to know he enjoys "freely shoving die-casted figurines up his ass"?
Kinky!
Maybe if you're a die caster you get free passage?
ReplyDeleteTo be more exact it means something like "sitting on the die cast is free of charge"
ReplyDeleteAw man. 8( This guy shouldn't have trusted Google Translate for Chinese/Kanji tattoos. That was a terrible Idea. My Sensei always tells me to contact her for proper translations on Kanji Tattoos. xD
ReplyDelete@Ashleigh: The mistake was made long before Google translate was involved. "Ride Hard and Die Free"? Swedish and English are similar enough languages that things translate very well between the two, but the phrase is idiomatic enough that it would be an extremely awkward translation, at best, to most other languages.
ReplyDeleteSo many of the bad tattoo translations featured on this site started with highly idiomatic or slang expressions that would be completely untranslatable - the lack of thought put into the tattoos becomes pretty obvious from the first step.
When will people learn that you can't translate thins word for word in another language and expect it to mean the same thing.
ReplyDelete