Hatys Harrete And Scrunckiesan

This post is dedicated to all my fellow non-native English speakers who are blogging in English. Sometimes we may feel insecure about not finding the correct word, or about our grammar being wonky, or about not knowing which preposition to use. So it is nice to occasionally find confirmation that, yes, it's not that bad after all. I recently had my first live encounter with Engrish, and it totally restored my self-confidence. These photographs are from the packaging of a toy our little Nona won at a fishing game at the local fair. "This is a popular toys for the children" indeed.

Funny Colt – Collect All Them!

On the hilarious Engrish.com Engrish is defined as "the humorous English mistakes that appear in Japanese advertising and product design." Whereas most Engrish originates from limited knowledge of the English language or automated translation, this specific example is quite peculiar. As "paries" and "kair" were used for "ponies" and "hair", I am guessing there are two possibilities. Either this was copied from a bad quality fax with text in a system font with a single-storey "a" like Century Gothic. Or the text was digitised using optical character recognition. Both theories explain why the "o", "n", and "h" could have been mistaken for "a", "r", and "k" respectively. But that's only half the story.

… tastefully set in outlined Clarendon and Bell Centennial with halo.

I can gather what the first two sentences were supposed to read. "There is a rainbow world where little ponies prance and play. Pony tails have shiny hair to comb and style." But what comes after that? "(…) hatys harrete and scrunckiesan (…)"!? For the life of me I wouldn't know what the original words were. Was the original so incredibly poorly reproduced? Or did the "copywriter" gradually become more and more confused, until he eventually gave up and freewheeled his way to the end? Who knows? Who cares? It sure made me smile.