VOA双语新闻 Americans Misuse Chinese Characters（在线收听）

From the moment Spaniards -- or was it Vikings? -- first dropped anchor and encountered the natives whom the Spanish called Indians (because they thought they had landed in India), the land now known as America has been a multicultural place. And of course it's much more so today. Just check out our faces and dialects and music.

从西班牙"海盗"第一次放下船锚并遇到当地土著人的那一刻，当今的美国就一直是有着多元文化的地方。西班牙人称当地土人为印第安人是因为他们认为他们是在印第安登的陆。当然在现在更是如此，只要看看我们的面孔，听听我们的方言和音乐就明白了。

And our signs -- in English, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and more. Well, maybe it's Chinese.

还有我们的标牌，用英语，西班牙语，阿拉伯语还有汉语标示的等等。啊，没准它就是用汉语标的。

Mandarin Chinese characters, called Hanzi, are hot right now. They're a popular decoration on clothing and artwork and tattoos.

普通话字符被称为汉字，在当今也非常火呀。它们是衣服，艺术品和纹身上流行的装饰。

But as Tian Tang, a young Chinese American who's a graduate student at Arizona State University, points out on his Internet website, Hanzismatter.com, an awful lot of these characters are just plain wrong. Some are not even Chinese at all, but pretty little ink strokes that sort of look Chinese.

但是亚利桑那州立大学的年青美籍华人研究生唐田,在他的的网站上指出有很多的汉字是写错了的。一些甚至根本就不是汉字，只有没有学问的人才会写出那种汉语来。

Mr. Tang's site shows us a colorful shirt decorated with a powerful, leaping tiger. Next to the beast are nine Chinese characters. But they translate into gibberish -- words like unicorn and chicken and superficial. Not one of the characters has anything to do with tigers, or even cats.

唐先生的网站向我们展示了一件颜色鲜艳饰有一只结实跃起的猛虎的衬衫。在老虎旁边写着九个汉字。但是他们都翻译成了难以理解的话，像独角兽，小鸡和肤浅这样的词汇。这些汉字中没有一个和老虎有什么联系，或者甚至是猫科动物。

Other Hanzi, delicately tattooed onto a woman's back, translate as crazy diarrhea. Surely this wasn't what she ordered from the tattoo artist.

另外，被精美的纹在一位女士后背的汉字，译成为"疯狂痢疾"。这当然一定不是她从纹身艺人那里定制的。

So, America is a multicultural melting pot. But reading the signs doesn't always tell you who you're melting with.

所以美国是一个多元文化的熔炉。但仅阅读这些标示并不意味着你也熔于其中了。