chinaSMACK!
For some reason or another, I hold this fascination with popular sayings and local culture. Nothing humors myself more than using some stupid-sounding slang or phrase prevailing at the time. Maybe this explains my vocabulary lately largely consists of: epic win, epic fail, FTW, oh noes, 0wned, and adding an ‘s’ on verbs paired with singular subjects.
But cracking this code in Chinese is even more thrilling, and for this, chinaSMACK is my best friend. This site takes popular articles or posts on the Internet and translates them into English, preserving the daily jargon. I’ve learned some crazy things, SY is short for masturbation, ML is to Make Love, and TMD (他妈的) is the equivalent of dammit.
Perhaps even more interesting are the articles that they translate. I’m told that they’re quite a bit out of date, but it’s all still news to me. One post has impressions of Obama winning the election and there’s a running series on Chinese People Secrets, very similar to PostSecret.
The comments on the articles (translated from the originals) give some fantastic insight into China’s netizens. And it makes reminds me that no matter how different cultures and values might be, we have more in common than we have in difference.
It’s not as eloquent as Engrish but quite cute nontheless