John You are about to have a Homer Simpson moment - I hope. Either that or your reply is somewhat disingenuous!
I'll assume the former in case there are any others for whom the (British) penny hasn't dropped. What actually happened was that the Dutch-Canadian guy alongside whom I was sitting in the tourist bus - and who demonstrated that he was considerably fitter than I was striding up the obligatory section of the Wall - came to me giggling wildly and urged me to go and read this plaque he'd found. I don't know how long he took to work it out but he was very tickled to have done so. I guess I had been prepared that there was a nice joke in the text and so it took just a fraction of a second to work out what had happened. The interpretation was helped by the fact that Chinese text was also present and it was possible to imagine that someone trained in English as a language but not at all versed in recent British history had taken the Chinese original to produce a translation in English. Thus we had a case of sort-of "Lost in Translation" - double-translation in fact, a sort-of "Chinese whispers"! If you still need help, you can open the "envelope" 10 lines below: . . . . . . . . . . - How would a Chinese speaker attempt to pronounce the voiceless "th"? - What two letters in the Latin alphabet do the folk of the Far East tend to use seemingly interchangeably? http://www.topics-mag.com/edition15/translation/l-and-r.htm TGIF! Chris Mason On Fri, 29 Jan 2010 07:45:09 -0600, Chase, John <[email protected]> wrote: >> -----Original Message----- >> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List On Behalf Of Chris Mason >> >> [ snip ] >> >> [1] This all reminds me of a plaque in a wall, written in both Chinese >and >> English, near the tourist shops by the Badaling Gate. It said >something about >> the famous people who had visited the Great Wall at this most usual >point for >> tourists - or statespeople in this case - from Beijing. "Nixon" was >clear but >> who was "Satchel"? > >Perhaps Leroy "Satchel" Paige, legendary American baseball pitcher >(Google "Satchel Paige")? > >Perhaps a misspelling of "Satchmo" (Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong, legendary >jazz musician)? > > -jc- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
