TsingTao Translation Goes Wrong

One of Brad's favourite things in China is  "TsingTao" beer - nearly every night he has to have at least one bottle or can of TsingTao.

He bought a 500ml can of TsingTao tonight and on the package there is symbol of the 2008 Beijing Olympics with a line "Official Sponsor of the Beijing 2008  Olympic Games" in both Chinese and English. What caught my attention is the big red Chinese characters and English line underneath:

“激情成就梦想”
"Passion dreams & success"

I guess this is the slogan of TsingTao Beer. But my point is not the purpose of the slogan, but the translation.

When you read the English, it is composed of three separate words - they are nouns and together they don't make much sense.

But when you read the Chinese, it is actually a sentence which means passion makes dreams come true.

After a second thought, I realised that the English translation is wrong - somehow the translator believed the Chinese sentence is made of three separate words, so he/she did a literal translation:
激情 - passion
梦想 - dreams
成就- success

To endorse my understanding is right, I found this news in Chinese which explained their slogan "Passion makes dreams come true".

As Beijing is carrying out campaigns to correct public Chinglish signs, I think the manufacturers and distributors (especially Olympics sponsors) should also pay more attention to the use of English - hire some professional translators (like me)  to verify  the accuracy of the English on their signs, products etc.

Comments

[Tom Cameron]

Translations often become action verbs themselves, taking on a life of their own. Growing up in Montreal in the 60's & 70's, the French people belived thier language to be constantly under under attack from the growing influence of English Canadian culture. Fran-glais was at its funiest in advertising. Just as with your beer can, billboards and cereal boxes were full of "say what?" mish mashes of nouns and verbs, often in a helter skelter order which better resmembled random collections of Alpha-bit cereal letters than gramaticaly correct word combinations. The language laws of the early 1980's changed the attitudes towards a more professional approach to translation. Yet it's fun to see the spirit of those quirky Fran-glais cereal box slogans resurected once more in Shanghai's Chinglsih beer ads of today. That's worth raising a beer or two with Brad :-)

[karen]

To me, it's like da "dream" is a verb at da first glance, and then I think you r right as there is a "&" . haha ~

[Poetryman]

will there be translators and guides for the Chinese olympics

[singout@gmail.com]

Were you Chinese, you should know the complexity of the Chinese language.

“激情成就梦想” is not a sentence, it's just three words listed. It comes from a CCTV
program which is a public show.
In English, "passion dreams& success" is a perfect annotation of the meaning of Chinese “激情成就梦想”.

[Hugh]

To be honest if I was going to translate text that would be visible by the public, I'd just use a translation company to ensure the translation read perfectly in the target language. They use language professionals instead of automated machines in order to prevent questionable translation errors such as the one above.

[Lilian]

This is true, there are still many Chinglish out there, even with major Chinese cities becoming more and more international.

Well, Chinese is a complicated language, sometimes, it's just not easy to find a right English translation. That's why we really need to get help from professional translation company.