Korean wisdom: Cats fuck over mice.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

H/t to Korea Beat for pointing this out. Naver (the most popular search engine in Korea) has a pretty good English-Korean-English dictionary full of example sentences for context for the English student, but every once in a while comes up with some pretty wacked out translations of Korean sentences the student is supposed to learn the English equivalent of. See what happens here when you do a search for sentences containing both the words cats and mice. Here they are:


Ah...is that so? The fourth sentence in Korean actually says "cats use mice for food". But maybe the English translation sums up the relationship between the two a bit more succinctly.

Sounds like a photoshopped image is in order. Thanks to Juggertha on DeviantART for getting the cat's face just right.




Need to explain to your Korean friend what "cats fuck over mice" means? In Korean it would be something more like 고양이들이 쥐를 졸라 못되게 구는다.

9 comments:

Unknown said...

What an interesting coincidence! In informal Portuguese (both in Brazil and in Portugal), the verb "comer" (lit. "to eat") is also used as a synonym of "foder [com]" (lit. "to fuck [with]").

***WARNING: More bad words ahead!***

In Portuguese, one could perfectly say "Aquele sujeito comeu uma mulher ontem." (lit. "That guy ate a woman yesterday") to mean "That guy fucked with a woman yesterday." And in fact "comer" often replaces "foder" this way, since "foder" is considered as a very rude word.

Thus "O gato comeu o rato." could mean "The cat ate the mouse." or "The cat fucked the mouse." as well. (Of course, the first interpretation would pragmatically be considered as the proper one, unless it is in a joke, in a weird fable, or in a bad automated software translation.)

It is interesting to know that Korean also uses the verb "to eat" to mean both "to eat" (literally) and "to fuck".

Anonymous said...

And I thought Koreans were gross for eating dogs.

Anonymous said...

@Antonielly
You misunderstood. It doesn't encompass both meanings in Korean. It was just a translation error, as the title says.

Anonymous said...

I mean, as the post says.

Anonymous said...

@Anonymous

Even if he misunderstood he still told an interesting story.

robf said...

3^anon;
|@Antonielly
|You misunderstood. It doesn't encompass both meanings in
|Korean. It was just a translation error, as the title
|says.

I don't think so. I imagine that translators actually have multiple definitions and at times weird context cuing systems modify definition priority. While this may not be the case here, I've seen it when backtranslating things on babelfish (english->japanese->english and so forth) you'd be surprised what comes out from simply sentances by changing some contexts.

Me said...

Eat does encompass the meaning fuck in the form 따먹다:

http://endic.naver.com/endic.nhn?docid=2244330&rd=s

But not fuck over or fuck with (at least not off the top of my head)...there are a lot of ways to use the verb eat (먹다) in Korean though; you "eat" years when you get older for example. It's kind of like the English word run where it has a few dozen ways to use it but there's no way you can just ask an English speaker to list them all off right then and there.

Mithridates said...

Eat does encompass the meaning fuck in the form 따먹다:

http://endic.naver.com/endic.nhn?docid=2244330&rd=s

But not fuck over or fuck with (at least not off the top of my head)...there are a lot of ways to use the verb eat (먹다) in Korean though; you "eat" years when you get older for example. It's kind of like the English word run where it has a few dozen ways to use it but there's no way you can just ask an English speaker to list them all off right then and there.

Anonymous said...

I mean, as the post says.

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