Compared to Chinese characters all with their own same-sized rectangular space, English words must be considered too long. They do not fit well in the long vertical signs in front of each store. So they have to be split to fit, this is usually done without the hyphen("-") because that would just make the word longer. Here are some signs that got into trouble.
When I saw this one I thought of getting a real bad hand at cards. Actually SOBDEALL is a high class clothier here in Asia.
The word "romantic" is a good sales word but this one seems like something that afflicted Julius Ceasar's army.
Maybe this one is for the Tony Soprano's victory tour. See how nicely the Chinese characters fill the available space.
Mixing Chinese and English can leading to some interesting situation. In the sign below, what are we taming? Dogs, a smoking habit, an insolent wife? Actually in the old romanization the first two characters are TA MING, meaning something like "big brightness", the last two characters translate to clinic. So half is untranslated and half is translated. ( "Brilliance" would have been a better translation.)
Here we have the English translation going down the sign.
And in this one, it's going up the sign.
This could make English crossword puzzles more interesting, not just across and
down, but now across, down and up.
Finally we have KILN, there is no family name close to this word. It is a corruption of the word MILK, spelt backwards and with N being pretty close to M. Got to say on your toes.
My teacher passed out these youtube links about Taiwan, they are pretty good, especially the 4th one.
1 comment:
I like the Taming Clinic sign. I also enjoyed the U-tube movies, especially the group blind date. I learned that tans are out in Taiwan, too. Some people here in Tucson, the world's capital of skin cancer, are trying to get warning labels put in tanning salons about the potential for skin cancer. There was just a newspaper article yesterday calling for a new beauty standard of paleness. Taiwan is ahead on that! We are very sun conscious here. I still look a little pale by most people's standards, but I think I am a little tan.
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