Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Lost in Translation

Once or twice every winter we lose electrical power as the result of a storm. So most people in this area stock up on batteries to power their flashlights and radios. While we too have a few similar needs, I've been slowly buying various wind-up devices which are more environmentally-friendly.

Today, I purchased an Environmental Protection Illuminant. According to the package's product description, the illuminant "adopt mechanical electricity generating with hand-wind, which has patent technique. precise structure, efficiency is 80% higher that the traditional one/changing products, green environmental protection."

Are you with me so far?

According to the Changing Method, "Drive for ten seconds, it can light for 5 minutes."

Finally, here's one more lovely sentence: "Precise structure, avoidance of felling from the high place during using it and avoidance of being affected with damp and water going in it, so as not to spoil the product."

Have you been able to figure out what I purchased? It's a wind-up flashlight! It's painfully obvious that this particular product was manufactured somewhere other than the US and that the product information was written by someone with a very loose grasp of the English language.

The illuminant itself seems to work well, but the product description and instructions had Della and I in hysterics.

4 comments:

  1. Try engrish.com if you want to see even worse attempts at English.

    ReplyDelete
  2. To say nothing of subtitled Hong Kong/Chinese wu xia/kung fu movies..."inevitable gluttonous rice!"

    ReplyDelete
  3. ALthough, I should speak Chinese so well!

    ReplyDelete
  4. LOL!

    As I was reading, I was thinking that maybe you could be on a bike pedaling away so you could have some "illumination." Hilarious.

    I bought, recently, a $9 digital clock, for the bathroom. The manual was 100% in Chinese, we had to figure the thing out on our own.

    But, hey, we bought it at the outdoor night market in the Chinese side of town.

    ReplyDelete

Comments are unmoderated, so you can write whatever you want.