When I lived in Athens in the early 1980s and the August heat hung heavily, a group of us would take a bus to a spring-fed lake on the city’s outskirts.

二十世纪八十年代初期当我住在雅典的时候，八月的酷暑把人压得抬不起头，我们当中的一群人跳上一辆巴士，去往城市郊外一座由泉水汇成的湖。

The water was cleaner than the nearby sea and there was a pleasant restaurant where, according to the English menu, you could choose between “fresh prawns” and “frigid prawns”. If those did not appeal, there were “caned sardines”.

湖水比附近的海水更加清亮，湖畔还有一家令人愉快的餐馆，根据那里的英文菜单，你可以在“新鲜明虾”与“冷淡明虾”（frigid prawns，本应为frozen prawns）之间择一而从。如果你对这些都不感兴趣，还可以选择“罐装沙丁鱼”(caned sardines)。

Greek islands’ English was often more creative than the capital’s. On Patmos there was a sign on the beach that said “No nuding aloud”.

希腊岛屿上的英文标识比首都雅典的更富创造性。帕特莫斯的沙滩上有一条标识写着“禁止大声裸体”(No nuding aloud)。

English signs and menus have provided pleasure for years. Charlie Croker’s books Lost in Translation and Still Lost in Translation brought us the Paris hotel that told guests “Please leave your values at the front desk” and the Japanese car park that said “Please get a punch at window No 2”.

多年来，英语标识和菜单带来了很多乐趣。查理·克罗克(Charlie Croker)的《迷失翻译》(Lost in Translation)与《依然迷失翻译》(Still Lost in Translation)中提到了巴黎宾馆让顾客“请把您的价值放在前台” (Please leave your values at the front desk) ，以及日本停车场说“请到2号窗口挨揍” (Please get a punch at window No 2)。

The march of English through Asia is recorded on websites such as Engrish.com, which features the Japanese luggage shop “Drastic The Baggage” and Seoul’s “Porky Childrens Wear”.

Engrish.com等网站记录了英语在亚洲的发展，上面展示了日本箱包店“Drastic The Baggage”以及首尔的“猪宝宝童装”(Porky Childrens Wear)等英语误用。

I don’t refer to these out of any anglophone superiority; I have caused enough merriment mangling other people’s languages. But if I were going to the trouble and expense of starting a business, I think I would ask a native speaker to check my signs.

我谈论这些问题，并非出于讲英语人士的优越性。我的蹩脚外语也曾经带来足够的笑话。但如果我自己出力花钱经商，我觉得我会找一位英语为母语的人士来帮我校对一下标识。

Why don’t people do that? In their paper “?‘Please don’t climb trees and pick flowers for the sake of life’ – making sense of bilingual tourism signs in China”, Oliver Radtke and Xin Yuan of Heidelberg University say we sometimes misunderstand the purpose of an English sign. It is not to help visitors but to appear cosmopolitan to locals. “It displays a certain level of sophistication, an international identity, even if the displayed English is faulty or features non-standard English wording,” they write.

人们为什么不这么做呢？海德堡大学(Heidelberg)的奥利弗·拉特克(Oliver Radtke)和Xin Yuan在其论文《“珍惜生命，请勿爬树摘花”——理解中国双语旅游标识》中表示，有时我们误解了使用英语标识的目的。有些地方用英语标识，并不是为了帮助游客，而是在当地人面前摆出大都市的姿态。他们写道：“这么做展现出一定程度的高雅，一种国际范儿，即便显示出来的英语是错的，或者用的是不标准的英语词汇。”

Their view is true, too, of slogans on Japanese clothing. “Be sport. Make up a recreation” is one I remember from my first visit there.

他们的观点也适用于日本服装上的口号。我记得第一次访问日本时曾看到“运动起来，编造娱乐”(Be sport. Make up a recreation)这样的标识。

Many signs are the result of overconfidence; shopkeepers, hotel owners and restaurateurs think their English is better than it is. Sometimes their command of the language is fine; it is sensitivity to English-speakers’ squeamishness that is lacking, as in Shanghai’s Senyo Anus and Intestine Hospital.

很多标识是信心膨胀的结果。店主、宾馆所有者以及餐厅业主的英语水平远低于自己认为的程度。有时他们对语言的掌握没什么错；欠缺的是对英语人士感受的敏感性，比如“上海中佑肛肠医院”(Senyo Anus and Intestine Hospital)。

These days, sign writers don’t need to rely on their own English, of course. There are internet translation tools to do their job for them. You see the results everywhere. “Forbid to embezzle fire apparatus” says the sign above a Shanghai restaurant’s fire extinguishers, pictured on Engrish.com.

如今，标识作者当然不需要依靠自己的英语。有互联网翻译工具可以完成他们的工作。这样的结果处处可见。Engrish.com上贴出的一张照片显示，上海一家餐厅的灭火器上写着“Forbid to embezzle fire apparatus”（消防设备严禁挪用）。

But web-based translation is improving rapidly, powered by one company in particular. “Google has created an automatic translation tool that is unlike all others,” David Bellos says in his hugely informative book on translation Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

不过基于网页的翻译正在迅速改善，尤其是在某一家公司的推动下。戴维·贝洛(David Bellos)在他令人大开眼界的翻译著作《你耳朵里有鱼吗？》(Is That a Fish in Your Ear)中表示：“谷歌(Google)打造了与众不同的自动翻译工具。”

Google Translate’s trick, Mr Bellos says, is that “it doesn’t deal with meaning at all”. What it does, when asked to turn a phrase into another language, is search for a translation that has been used already.

贝洛表示，谷歌翻译的诀窍是，“它根本不处理意义。”当被要求把一句话翻译成其他语言时，谷歌翻译的做法是搜索已经使用过的翻译。

“The corpus it can scan includes all the paper put out since 1957 by the EU in two dozen languages, everything the UN and its agencies have ever done in writing in six official languages, and huge amounts of other material,” Mr Bellos writes.

贝洛写道：“谷歌搜索引擎扫描的资料包括欧盟(EU)自1957年以来用24种文字发布的所有文件，联合国(UN)及其下属机构用6种官方语言发布的所有文件，以及大量其他材料。”

Looking at the mass of translations that have already occurred, Google Translate uses statistical methods to decide which is most likely to be correct. “Much of the time, it works. It’s quite stunning,” Mr Bellos says.

谷歌翻译在已经出现过的翻译中搜索，使用统计学方法决定哪一条可能最正确。贝洛表示：“很多时候这种做法是管用的。很惊人。”

But sometimes web translations produce signs that are not just wrong but incomprehensible. What, to cite two of the Heidelberg paper’s examples, did the signwriter in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, mean by “No chaotic doodle” and what do we infer from the lakeside sign in Suzhou, China that says “No swimming, fishing or whiffing in the pond”?

但有时网页翻译产生的标识不仅是错的，而且难以理解。引用海德堡大学论文中的两个例子：台湾高雄标语作者写的“禁止混乱涂鸦”(No chaotic doodle)是什么意思？我们又如何推测中国苏州湖边标识上写的“禁止在池塘游泳、垂钓或吹风”(No swimming, fishing or whiffing in the pond)？

Any user of Google Translate knows it works best when you have a good knowledge of the language it is translating into. It will, no doubt, get better still, but, because it is a machine rather than a person, a feel for the right phrase will, I suspect, always be missing.

只有精通译入语的谷歌翻译用户，才能知道是否达到了最佳翻译效果。毫无疑问，谷歌翻译还会变得更好，但因为它只是机器而不是人，我怀疑总会缺少一点用词妥帖的感觉。

At least I hope so. Puzzling signs are among the joys of travel. My recent Greek trips have been brief and only to Athens, where both the food and the English appear to have improved.

至少我希望如此。让人疑惑的标识是旅行的乐趣之一。我最近的希腊之行很短暂，只去了雅典，那里的食物和英语看上去都有所改进了。

If you’re having a summer holiday in Greece, perhaps you will tell me it isn’t so. I would be disappointed if my old favourite, “grilled lamp”, was now off the menu.

如果你正在希腊度假，或许你会告诉我，情况并非如此。如果现在菜单上没有了我过去最喜欢的“烤灯”(grilled lamp)，我会很失望的。