Some of my other favorite Konglish memories from my time in Korea include graffiti and a fried chicken chain.
The first was written in red, lower-case letters across the side of a house: "I wanna death!" The odd thing, other than the hilarious grammar, was it was written with near-perfectly formed letters. Most Koreans have wonderful English handwriting, but the odd thing was to see it used in graffiti - where most vandals take artistic liberties in the U.S.
The second was a victim of re-translation. Start with 1) "Popeye's Chicken" in English, then transfer it over to Korean letters in your mind and you get 2) "Pah-pah-ee-juh Chee-keen." The trick is in translating it back so one can have a "hip" English subtitle when ordering company signs, letterhead, receipts, etc. One might think the obvious method to be to lookup the company on the internet, but - perhaps because they're lazy, perhaps because they want to simultaneously be hilarious and avoid copyright infringement - a much better method is to simply pick something that 2 "sounds" like. You know, go with your gut. Oddly (or should I say lucky?) enough, the way Koreans say "is" sounds much like "ee-juh," so 2 "translates" wonderfully into 3) "Pappa is Chicken" - the perfect name for a fried chicken joint.
I have pictures of both of these, but, alas, OmniNerd v2 doesn't have photo support in comments. Perhaps I'll write more on this topic in an article and include them there. Or, maybe v3 will have photo support in coffeeshops and I can put them there...
Add a Comment
Email This
RSS
Konglish memories
Some of my other favorite Konglish memories from my time in Korea include graffiti and a fried chicken chain.
The first was written in red, lower-case letters across the side of a house: "I wanna death!" The odd thing, other than the hilarious grammar, was it was written with near-perfectly formed letters. Most Koreans have wonderful English handwriting, but the odd thing was to see it used in graffiti - where most vandals take artistic liberties in the U.S.
The second was a victim of re-translation. Start with 1) "Popeye's Chicken" in English, then transfer it over to Korean letters in your mind and you get 2) "Pah-pah-ee-juh Chee-keen." The trick is in translating it back so one can have a "hip" English subtitle when ordering company signs, letterhead, receipts, etc. One might think the obvious method to be to lookup the company on the internet, but - perhaps because they're lazy, perhaps because they want to simultaneously be hilarious and avoid copyright infringement - a much better method is to simply pick something that 2 "sounds" like. You know, go with your gut. Oddly (or should I say lucky?) enough, the way Koreans say "is" sounds much like "ee-juh," so 2 "translates" wonderfully into 3) "Pappa is Chicken" - the perfect name for a fried chicken joint.
I have pictures of both of these, but, alas, OmniNerd v2 doesn't have photo support in comments. Perhaps I'll write more on this topic in an article and include them there. Or, maybe v3 will have photo support in coffeeshops and I can put them there...
View Full Discussion