To save Germany
Cheng Fangyi sent in the following photograph of a sign in China:
What this actually says is:
Néng chī shì fú, jiéyuē shì dé 能吃是福，節約是德。
("To eat is a blessing, economizing is a virtue.")
The structure of the two parallel clauses is identical; it is both simple and straightforward: SUBJECT (consisting of a verbal nominative) + COPULATIVE + PREDICATE NOMINATIVE. Since the translator got the first clause right, both in terms of grammatical analysis and semantic content, they should have been able to apply similar operations to the second clause. Their inability to do so indicates that they didn't really understand English on their own, but were relying entirely on translation software, without even checking the result at all.
There's no way that a fluent speaker of Chinese could interpret the dé 德 of the jiéyuē shì dé 節約是德 clause as the dé 德 of Déguó 德國 ("Germany", lit. "Dé-country", the country whose name begins with the sound dé, i.e., < "Deutschland"). And jiéyuē 節約 ("saving; economizing; being thrifty"; i.e., "not wasting") is a common lexical item, so that shouldn't have thrown them off either.
Another strange aspect of the translation is that, although the two clauses are considerately separated by a space in the Chinese, all of the words of the English run on without a break (the boundary between the two clauses should be marked by a comma or semi-colon or a conspicuous space), making it seem as though "to save Germany" is somehow a consequence of "to eat is a blessing" — a truly bizarre prospect.
Bottom line: no one with even a minimal understanding of English bothered to check the result of the machine translation.
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