One of those things that really irks me is (and I have to be really careful here because I know I’m going to offend someone) people who get Chinese or Japanese lettering as tattoos on their bodies.
Unless you actually speak, and can write, the language yourself, you’ve no idea what you’ve got permamently written on you. This is particularly the case if the person who did the tattoo was not of Asian origin (although I’m sure that there are a limited number of white tattooists who can write Kanji perfectly).
So it was entertaining to find out that there’s a website – Hanzimatter – dedicated to telling people what their tattoos and lettering really mean. (The link came via Neil Gaiman’s site).
It’s amusing to think that we all laugh at those Japanese T-shirts that mangle English words because they’re put together by someone who doesn’t speak the language, or maybe used Babelfish to do the translation. Yet we’re equally as bad.
Aside from the fact that I’d never have a tattoo anyway, I’d like to think that I’d want anything I had written in a foreign language to have been written by someone who speaks it, rather than copies it from a book (many of the examples on the Hanzi Smatter website are poorly written rather than just wrong). And even then, you’d always have at the back of your mind, the possibility that they’ve written “dickhead” or something similarly charming.