Carefully Slide on This Slippery Floor
This photo is taken at the toilet of the airport in Hohhot, capital city of China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The original Chinese characters means “Take care, slippery floor” and is mistranslated into English as “Carefully slide.” Well, thanks to the fact that each Chinese character can have so distinctive functions & meanings.
小心 means “care”, but since most Chinese words can serve as various parts of speech, they can also mean “careful” or even to “take care”. Whereas 滑 could be “slippery” or “to slide”.
And the really confusing thing is 地, which can either be 1) land, floor, earth, territory; or simply 2) a suffix for adverbs (-ly). That’s why “Take care, slippery floor” is mistranslated like this.
