I dunno, I have some workout trousers with a Chinese logogram on them. Dunno what it means. Hope I won’t ever
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?
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.
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?
Some guesses: it looks cool, it makes people curious to ask “what’s that supposed to mean?”, the dude was a christian otaku
As someone who went to Japan, yeah I’d expect that shit there more than in America honestly
That is actually the same thing.
Asian beauty makes me think of an ad for makeup. Alternatively, those cool looking mountains from old looking paintings that look like giant ant mounds.
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.
Indeed 'twas a tampon with blood upon it
@glitchdx@lemmy.world here’s the OP confirmation
Alexa, what’s a tampon?
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 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 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?
Something in Japanese
Alright, I’ll bite. What’s it mean?
Yeah, but what exactly?
No, What’s on second
Then who’s on first?
Yes.
Something in Japanese! What’s on my back?
Dude! What does it say?
What doesn’t say anything, he’s on second.
Sweet! What does mine say?
DUDE! What does mine say?
Literally “something in Japanese”
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.
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.
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 met someone with a “Man shall not lie with another man” tattoo.
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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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I was once at a convenience store, run by a Chinese man, and this 30ish girl in a tank top, obviously a regular comes in and says @look I got my sons name tattooed. Then she says, “look, Aitor@“. The guysmiles nervously. She leaves, and I ask the guy, who es shaking his head, and he says that it was some random mataré sign.
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?
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.
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
Ooo may I have a guess - Daniel and Lilian?
edit - typo
Nope.
Ah nevermind then. Thought I got what the characters were haha
Upvote becausei was sure you’d have it.
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.
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.
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.
Same picture
Hentai Gaijin
This would be perfect for me and my IBS-D
Should’ve been ゲーリー, not ゲリ. No wonder people got confused.
Geri is my favourite Indonesian crackers, but not so much the chocolate ones…
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.
This is like setting your guest WiFi password to “It’s on the wall over there.”
I knew a barista that set the wifi pass to “ten bucks”.
Who’s on first?
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.
Is your friend Steve-O?
Was it a nice ass at least?
It has to be if your name is on it
Because your name is such dogshit that it makes everything around it nicer by comparison
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.
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
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
That’s the kind of stupid I like.
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.
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.
Trolling level expert 😂
Removed by mod
there are no awards on Reddit anymore ?
it’s old, because it has reddit silver, but it’s not that old, because it has reddit silver.
I want “pretty nice and vanilla guy” tattooed on me, and I’ll say it means “horrible pervert”
Don’t leave out the part about your omniscience
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
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.”
That’s actually hilarious.
Ehm… isn’t “日本” = “Japan” both in chinese and japanese?
Thats what google translate is telling me anyway
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
Yes.
Username checks out so I trust this commenter with my life right now.
