Forget “Finger Lickin’ Good.” How about “Eat Your Fingers Off”?
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 11.28.05 | 12:51 PM ET
Doug Lansky ruminates on bad translations in Sunday’s Kansas City Star, pointing out a few fine examples in a world where between 350 million and 1 billion people now speak English as a second language. Among others, he cites KFC’s slogan “Finger Lickin’ Good,” which was mangled in China to become, “Eat Your Fingers Off!” Writes Lansky: “Even in a country where some people regularly eat dog meat, snake blood, scorpions and grasshoppers, this was rather unappetizing.”
He writes:
Before laughing, consider for a moment who among us would have the courage to put up a sign in a foreign language? Just imagine the hilarity if we tried to cover our English-speaking lands with signs for Russian, Turkish or Chinese tourists. We’d walk around completely unaware of gaffes that would have these travelers rolling with laughter in our streets.
Do you think we’d take the time to check spellings, grammar and possible double entendres in even a small percentage of the world’s roughly 6,800 known languages (2,261 of which have writing systems)?
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
kevin brown 08.24.06 | 10:38 AM ET
You are pathetic, you narrow minded idiot. Chinese people do not regularly, “eat dog meat, snake blood, scorpions and grasshopper.” If you’ve ever visited China you’d know that people look at that stuff the way people from Colorado look at “Rocky mountain oysters.” Racist twit, you keep the rest of the world ignorant. Keep writing from your computer in the middle of jersey while you jerk off to asian porno—idiot.
Vizierde 06.06.07 | 2:49 PM ET
I eated my fingers off once. D: