Chinese WeChat App Translation Hitch Hits Headlines - Creative Word

The popular Chinese messaging App, WeChat, has issued a formal apology after a translation hitch meant some English words were mistranslated in Chinese on March 3rd.

The hitch, which offered mistranslations such as, ‘you are so Kris Wu’ being translated into ‘you’re real adorable’ was quickly spotted by users of the App who then began posting screenshots of their own unusual translations on Weibo.

Other odd translations included:

‘You are so tfboys,’ along with a Chinese translation meaning ‘you are really great’ (你们真是太好了).

While Chinese Pop singer Lai Meiyun’s initials translated to ‘cute’ on the WeChat hitch.

Chinese celebrities such as Cai Xukun, Lai Meiyun and Cai Weize also saw their names translated into unusual Chinese translations. Some of these mistranslations even worked when only using the initials of the celebrities.

The translation error soon began trending on Weibo with more than 270 million people viewing and over 20,000 users posting and commenting using the hashtag roughly translated as #IsWeChatTranslateforReal?# (#微信翻译是认真的吗?#).

WeChat have apologised for the translation blunder and are working to fix the issues, but until this time they have removed the translating function for any sentence containing the ‘unofficial’ English words which were not recognised by their translation software.

This is a relatively inoffensive translation hitch for WeChat, who have faced far worse in the past. In 2017 there was a well-publicised mistranslation of the phrase ‘black foreigner’ being translated into the N-word.

WeChat issued an apology in this instance and fixed the problem soon after it was noticed.

Other mistranslations online are rife and include Google Translate’s strange ‘end-of-the-world’ messages last summer (2018), and KFC’s slogan being mistranslated from ‘finger-lickin’ good” to “eat your fingers” in Chinese!

While this current mistranslation is both funny and harmless, this is not always the case, and often previous translation errors have caused offence to users, as in the case of the Chinese computer game ‘Kerbal Space Program’, which received more than 300 complaints from gamers regarding gender mistranslations on the game.