Here’s an interesting machine translation fail I’ve seen a few times recently.
Actually “carefully slide” is a valid translation of 小心地滑, but presumably the sign writer meant something like “careful, slippery floor”.
小心 means “careful” and 滑 is either a verb meaning “to slide” or an adjective meaning “slippery” depending on the context. The problem is the character 地 in the middle, which if pronounced like dì is a noun meaning “ground”, but if pronounced like de is a special grammatical particle that connects adverbs to verbs (it’s a bit like -ly in English). So you can either read it like careful-ground-slippery or careful-ly-slide.
Interestingly I tried just now and Baidu gave me “Caution! Wet Floor!” and Google gave me “Caution: Slippery”, so I guess technology has improved a bit.
Posts