Borkem ipsum: Supermarket gifts Thailand a tech fail that will echo down the millennia – and probably choke a turtle Tesco, king of the High Street Bork, may have departed the Thai retail business, but it has left a little bit of borkery behind. While not signage spewing silage or Windows indulging in acts of Blue, we're pretty sure a computer was involved at some point in the cheery design of this reusable bag. While few would quibble with …
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Remember that is Thailand, different language, different alphabet. 95% of the people could not read one paragraph in English and among those who read, who would care to, and among those who care, most would think that if they don't understand, that is because they are lacking the vocabulary.
Who is crazy enough to read what is written on their shopping bags?
Percy:
But it sounds LIKE Greek..."What's not Greek, but sounds like Greek?" Hm, that's a good one, my lord!
Prince Edmund:
Look, it's not meant to be a brain-teaser, Percy! I'm simply trying to tell you that I can’t understand a blind word they're saying.
Percy:
Well, no wonder, my lord. You never learned Greek.
The sun is over the yardarm
Why isn't there an icon for a gin and tonic?
Beer is simply too vulgar.
As are Tesco's plastic bags.
You have to elbow past them all dressed in their made-of-oil product onesies and tracksuits - not that any of them can run, far too fat - to get to the shelves, despite social distancing.
What does this comment have to do with the article?
About as much as the article has to do with IT.
I think I'll shop at Waitrose
...but have we considered the possibility that this is intentional? Who reads small-print on a shopping bag anyway, and the Japanese have a long-standing tradition of using western text at least as much as an art form rather than a medium so perhaps the same thing is happening here.
Most recently, it’s the logo below that is most commonly seen on Superdry products. Superdry's logo: 極度乾燥（しなさい）
Be maximum dry! If you keep your eyes open, it probably won’t be long before you catch sight of someone wearing this slogan. It reads ‘kyokudo kanso (shinasai),’ translating roughly as ‘maximum dry’, followed by the imperative form of ‘do’, bizarrely placed in brackets. This is apparently a bad attempt at translating ‘Do Superdry’ into Japanese – presumably achieved with the help of a dictionary rather than by anyone with knowledge of the language. Whoever came up with these logos seems to have thought that their customer base (which notably includes David Beckham, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) wouldn’t notice that they were essentially gibberish – and judging by recent sales figures they seem to have been right.
http://www.unmissablejapan.com/etcetera/superdry
No relation to Asahi Super Dry Beer
Somewhere around here I have a copy of IBM's little booklet on programming the original IBM PC (with DOS 1.x) using BIOS calls in assembly language instead of directly addressing the hardware. Not too unusual for the era, but this book has a bit of a twist. For some reason, it was translated from English to Japanese (judging by how the syntax was garbled) and then back to English. Apparently neither translator was technically inclined. The resulting gibberish has to be seen to be believed.
I have also managed to acquire a copy of the IBM original. If I can locate them while this thread is still relevant, I'll transcribe a couple paragraphs from each.
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