Nicky was given a toy last week – a 3D puzzle of a Ferrari racing car. The puzzle was made in China, and the people who created the packaging were obviously not English-speakers. Perhaps they had access to Google Translate and decided that translating the Chinese text a word at a time was the best way to go. We had a pretty good time reading the instructions:

Use hand and head — Training kid’s flexible for their proportion on the hands and eyes. Develop them imagination ability. Make a teaching fairyland.

Design munificent — It can be assemblaged detached over and over, and looks like veritable. It needn’t any assist tools.

Perfect in workmanship — Materials are daintiness. Safety and slightly. Full of colour printing.

It could certainly be said that it’s not fair to make fun of these people because their English, as bad as it is, is better than my Chinese. This is absolutely true – I don’t know a word of Mandarin, Cantonese, or any other Chinese language. But I’m not writing Chinese text for a product that will be sold in China. If that was my job, I might try talking to someone who actually speaks Chinese.  If I were to write it myself, I’m sure it would be pretty damned funny to Chinese speakers.