Love In the Butt?

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Apparently the title of this film is actually Love In the Buff, but it sure looks like “butt” to me, which gave me a good chuckle when I saw the poster for this movie in Sunnybank (and “buff” is pretty funny in any case). Anyway, this got me to thinking about all the mangled Asian English I’d seen over the years, and I thought it might make for a good Asian Sirens post. Other good sources of this are restaurant names (one of the ones in Sunnybank is called “Glamorous Wok”) and Japanese porn (for example: “Caution! She is Pretty Bust Monsters!”). Please post your own in the comments!

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0 thoughts on “Love In the Butt?”

  1. I’ve seen enough mangled English grammar and misspellings in real life to not want to look for any more of it on the net. In fact, I see some every time I look at the movie poster for A Night on the Water on my office wall. The tagline reads:

    Unbearable Love,
    Unbearable Sadness,
    Her body dreams uncontrolled passionate night.

    I get it but it was obviously written by someone who didn’t have a complete grasp of English. Anyway, this is the poster and I will not rest until I get Sunghi Lee to sign it:

  2. Yeah, I was hoping people could post their real life experiences. Surely as our readers are such aficionados of Asian women, they would have seen several examples of this?

  3. Seen on a pack of sweets, Shandong 2008:
    And with this ring our lives will
    start swaaring that we’ll never
    part i offer what you cannot duy
    devoted love until we die.

    Another sweet packet:
    Selected material High quality food
    Intoxicated with romantic feelings

    Curtains in coffee shop in a city in Shandong printed with computer software installation instructions.

    On hotel sugar sachets in Jiangsu, PRC, 2011:
    Brown SUGER

    On the front of a Tshirt (not the tag) in Shandong 2008:
    WASH BY HAND
    DO NOT WNING
    DO NOT BLEACH EST.1989

    Not Chinglish but I wonder if the wearers know the meaning?

    On back of a T-shirt, Shandong, 2008
    “I’M FUCKIN YOUR GIRLFRIEND”
    and
    “HI. YOU’LL DO”
    From an English textbook:
    “…the main ingredients are chrysanthemum and mint with delicate fragrance. In Chinese medicine, they are used to weaken the hotness in human body in summer.”
    Sign in Hotel 168 Shenzhen, 2010:
    To purchase a fire insurance fire safety is guaranteed.
    Same hotel, Rule No 4.
    No birds, domestic animals, or other unsnairy articles are allowed to be brought into the hotel.
    Saving the best IMO for last, Rule No 3.
    No guest is allowed to up anyone for the night or let anyone use his/her own bed in the hotel.

  4. CEC, too bad Sung Hi’s site isn’t running anymore. She would have signed it for you for sure. She signed many items for me over the years and would always return them very fast.

  5. The official fan t-shirts for South Korea during the 2010 World Cup read:

    KOREA LEGEND
    begin to 2010

    With all the native English-speaking teachers in that country, couldn’t someone have asked one of them if that sounded right, before they started running off those shirts by the thousands??

    The “questionable” English grammar on those shirts is what actually led me to this photo of model Han Ga-eun (below). See her entry here.

  6. Yes CEC! I have always thought that there was a niche market there for consultant English teachers.
    I shook my head once in disbelief when an English exam was given to students written by Chinese teachers. Full of spelling mistakes, and Chinglish – wrongly worded questions and multiple choice answers. And they never thought to ask any of the dozen foreigners at the school to proof it??

  7. Yeah – I’m always amazed that they won’t get a simple proof read from a real English speaker before they publish this stuff!

  8. It’s actually a really good movie so if you havent seen it, i suggest you go watch is NOAAAW…
    watch the prequel first though

  9. I actually edit “Krenglish” text daily, and often respond with Google translated Korean. What I’ve learned is that our translation of foreign languages is far more comical than theirs. We remain the fools.

  10. @weekender: We are only fools if we don’t check it out with a native speaker of that language before sending/posting/publishing it.

    For instance, even though my written Korean may not be grammatically perfect, it can be clearly understood, but despite that, before I sent my interview questions to Hana Hong, I still had a native Korean-speaking friend give them the once-over.

    I’m sure Dr. Lee will concur that we’re not poking fun at other’s English skills (or lack of) here. What we’re poking fun at is the lack of common sense to have something checked out by a native English speaker before releasing it for the masses to read.

  11. Can anyone translate the movie title from the Chinese into English?
    Oh and Doc, there must be a sizeable market for Chinese movies in Sunnybank now? Any idea (apart from saying ‘lots’) of the Asian population there?

  12. I can’t speak to how things are in China or Korea, but Jack Seward had a good explanation of how these things happen in Japan. When he was working in a Japanese office, he made a similar suggestion after noticing the poor quality of English in outgoing international correspondence. He suggested to the bosses that he proof read such correspondence, and they agreed, saying it was a wonderful idea. Two things happened. First was a loss of face by those who’s correspondence got marked up, resulting in a reluctance to have it proof read, and second was that having all international correspondence go though Seward became a minor inconvenience. As a reult, things slowly returned to their “natural” state of affairs. I’ve been in enough Japanese workplaces tha,t while I never saw that exact circumstance, I’ve seen a lot of similar ones.

  13. @longtack: all I can say is, when you go to Sunnybank, the vast majority of people you see are Chinese, although the percentage of Koreans is increasing rapidly. (Interestingly, Koreans are already the dominant Asians in the Brisbane CBD – Japanese were a decade ago.) There’s also several Japanese and Vietnamese. One regularly sees movies, concerts, dance parties etc. specifically targeted at the Chinese market here.

  14. I want to hear more about the Sung Hi Lee movie1

    I wish I could remember all off the funny sins I saw in Japan, but the only one I can still recall is a traffic sign encouraging us to “Slow Dawn.” I knew a few Dawns, and they weren’t slow at all:-)

  15. The Japanese version of the poster for the Bond film You Only Live Twice reads “007 Dies Twice” in Japanese. I mention this here because it co-starred the only Japanese Bond Girls to date, Akiko Wakabayashi and Mie Hama, both featured here.

    @Wingsfan: More on A Night on the Water here. If you must own it after reading that (and if you’re Sunghi fan, you must), scroll down that same page to the Amazon “Recommended” box, where the DVD is listed.

  16. From a Craigslist personal ad a while back:

    “Hello,Darling.welcome to here.if you are looking for this to have the charm Chinese girl truly, and wants to enjoy together with her must with the general joy, that is I not wrong. I am the thermal energy four shoot, has the super sexy body, the rich fervor’s groan, my all let you be crazy sufficiently, make you to be in a stew, invests the sea which completely loves. My name is Janny..My number is [I deleted it]”
    …but I have it if you want it lol.

    oh and thanks Doc for the Sunnybank stuff.

  17. ‘Love in the Buff’ is clearly printed inside the sleeve.

    “After ambition becomes lover with spring Jiao clearly, very quick people the intense emotion while meeting by chance, already drive each other of the entirely different value gradually dilute. people also want to bear with the weakness of the other party, the romance gets into dispassion to expect. people are sent official business in Peking by the superior respectively at
    this time, the ambition meets a stewardess clearly still excellent
    . her shape is lovely to float convex, the gentleness is conside-
    rate; As well the spring Jiao accident knows mature and resp
    onsible SAM, at living detail up care she very considerate. But when spring Jiao and ambition the clear Jing again weigh to ….”

    [and that’s where the blurb ended].

    Stars:
    Miriam Yeung (b 1974)
    Shawn Yue (no d.o.b.)
    Mi Yang (b. 1986)

    The movie, set in contemporary Beijing, is quite watchable. Seems to be a showcase for China’s rapid development, its adoption of luxury cars (Range Rover paid for product placement?), women’s fashion, and wonderfully distinctive architect designed houses that are the hallmarks of ‘yuppie’ 30-something Chinese with high disposable incomes.
    Apart from greetings and apologies I understood nothing of the dialogue. The DVD claimed it had English subtitles, and if I find how to set them up, I’d watch it again, even though I could follow much of the story by watching the scenes.
    The women are good looking. Miriam Yeung is quite pretty , although she has a strangely shaped nose. A disco scene featured some nice boobs in low cut dresses.
    I think a couple of ‘extras’ – better described as eye candy – have been featured on AS.
    Unfortunately, we don’t get to see enough of their assets.
    At the end is a music video of a haunting love song from the movie. And a contemporary soft rock song in English also features.
    So, ‘Love in the Buff’ – the love is there, but all the butts are covered, which means that nobody appears ‘in the buff’.
    The title remains a mystery. Perhaps, as Miriam loses 3 boyfriends (they all die suddenly under no suspicious circumstances), falling in love again is a ‘pain in the butt’..err buff.

  18. I forgot to mention I bought this as a DVD the other day on the mainland for 10 rmb (under $AUD 2).

  19. Luke72, it doesn’t exist. Maybe it’s a porno featuring anal sex?
    ‘Love in the Buff’ is the sequel to ‘Love in a Puff’. It premiered at HK film festival in late March 2012.
    Google it, read the reviews.
    The ‘on topic’ part of my post is the incredible Chinglish in the blurb on the DVD sleeve.

  20. Yeah I got that, I wouldn’t be surprised if it did though, although it probably wouldn’t be in China. I’ll keep an eye out 😉

  21. Bloody false advertising if you asked me.
    No Butt, No Buff! Some of those Sunnybank Asian movie goers might be disappointed. 😉

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