Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Direct translation ... duh!

When I was in Beijing, everytime when I boarded a cab there will be an automated machine which will say something like 'Thank you for taking Beijing taxi'. Basically the local will try to translate word by word from Chinese to English, hence it sounded a bit funny.

Anyway, this happened to a relative of mine in Beijing. At the airport he needed to withdraw money from the ATM. He walked up the ATM and put in his foreign ATM card. After a few seconds, a female voice spoken out from the machine and my relative making a a mild whispering to the machine! The line at the back was wondering what went wrong. The whispering continues and can be overheard.

Later, we found out the machine actually said something like 'Please tell me your password'. (Directly translated but the meaning became distorted). So my relative actually thought it was voice recognition and telling the machine his password over and over again!!! What the machine actually meant was to key in your password onto the pad!

3 comments:

Bahija said...

HaHaHaHaHaHaHa ....this is hillarious, I am laughing out loud now .....'pls tell me your password' - hahahaha...

rotitelur said...

oh this is classic....I like it

Kiasu-Ching said...

My relative said must pay to listen to this joke!