This is the oddest advertisement, "Wo Cho kou li ni," which they directly translate to English, "I Chocolate you." Did not know chocolate could be a verb. Is it like a Dirty Sanchez? I am not sure I want to be "Chocolated" by anybody.
In case you cannot see clearly the name of this restaurant, it is "Any Good Restaurant." You do not have to be a vegetable lady at the farmers market to figure out why they named their restaurant this long and cumbersum title. Some goofy guy picked up a phrase book and found the saying, "Do you know any good restaurants?" and decided to make the name of their place the same, so that when some tourist pops into a taxi and asks them that question, they can say-"Yeah, take you right there." Wonder if it works. haha
yet your English is spot on??
Posted by: | October 20, 2006 at 05:36 PM
It should be "love chocalate" or "I love chocalate". Even though chocalate usually relates to love and romance, from a translation point of view, this is a bad job.
But this reminds me a phrase people loved to use after watching a Japanese drama years ago, which was "I apple you." In that drama, everytime the couple showed up, there would be a crystal apple somewhere in the scene.
Posted by: Johnboytx3 | October 20, 2006 at 11:31 PM
I don't think they translated Chinese into English, but rather the other way around. They have constructed a catchy English phrase, "I Chocolate You" because it's called the Chocolate phone (it's popular in the States too) and have put a poor Chinese transliteration/translation to it.
愛 (ai) - I,
巧克力 (qiao ke li) - chocolate
o約 (yue) - YOU
The use of 愛 (ai) to represent I is to both represent love for the phone and the phonentic sound.
As far as i can tell, there is no character for 口 + 約， but in Chinese it is common (at least in Cantonese and in other dialects) to place a mouth radical when a word is borrowed for it's phonetic sound (also commonly written with an o in front of it in the online world, o約)... to any extent, they intend "yue" to sound like YOU. Which it really doesn't.
if I were to anglicize the sound, it would be somehting like "I chao kou li you" Good find jake.
Posted by: Andy 食神 | October 21, 2006 at 09:03 AM
Pretty fun! They just trying to make things fashionable i guess. Hehee. interesting though =^.^=
Posted by: Jenny D. | October 24, 2006 at 12:49 PM
learn some fucking chinese then come back n brag it u fucking jerk!!!american redneck corny ass!!! i bet u've never seen this kind of banner from ur village.
Posted by: unknow | November 04, 2006 at 12:45 PM
Have not had a comment like that in a long time...someone needs to get some loving. Do you need a hug Mr. Unknown?
Posted by: Jake | November 05, 2006 at 07:13 AM
Using "chocolate" as a verb is simply a marketing ploy. Frankly, I think it's kind of clever. Too bad the handset hasn't received very good reviews.
However, the "Any Good Restaurant" thing is pretty funny. In QD, a car wash is called a "Car Bathroom." Again, pretty funny stuff.
Posted by: David Scott Lewis | December 30, 2006 at 02:17 PM