Campaign for promoting falls awareness

The Health Promotion Board (Bǎojiàn cùjìn jú 保健促进局) of Singapore has launched a campaign to promote awareness of falling.  Here's the poster they circulated in conjunction with the launch:

(Source)

The poster quickly began to circulate on the internet, with people criticizing the Chinese translation as saying the opposite of what was intended.  (Note that in Singapore the main language of government and the work place is English, so things have to be translated from it into the other three official languages — Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil, with Malay still held to be the "national language".)

Here's what the poster says:

tuīguǎng diédǎo yìshí yùndòng 推广跌倒意识运动 ("campaign / movement for promoting awareness of falling")

Here's an example of what the critics think the translation should have been:

fáng diē yìshí yùndòng 防跌意识运动 ("campaign / movement for awareness of preventing falling")

I would like to initiate a debate or survey among Language Log readers concerning which of the versions is inferior and which is superior.

Incidentally, in America the equivalent event, sponsored by the National Council on Aging, is called the Falls Prevention Awareness Day.

The critics of the tuīguǎng diédǎo yìshí yùndòng 推广跌倒意识运动 ("campaign / movement for promoting awareness of falling") called it a "wūlóng fānyì 乌龙翻译".  It's apparent from the context that wūlóng fānyì 乌龙翻译 must mean something like a "botched translation".  As a tea aficionado, I am intrigued by how wūlóng 乌龙 (lit., "black dragon") came to be used in the sense of "blunder", since by far the most common application of the expression is in reference to Oolong tea.

The wūlóng 乌龙 ("blunder") of wūlóng fānyì 乌龙翻译 ("botched translation") comes from the expression "bǎi wūlóng 摆乌龙" ("commit a blunder").

Now, in an effort to understand how wūlóng 乌龙 ("black dragon"), as in Oolong tea, came to mean a "blunder", I'm going to switch to traditional characters, since most references (e.g., this one and this one) attempt to explain this usage as being derived from Cantonese wu1lung4*2 kau4 烏龍球 ("own goal"), a boner in football where one causes the ball to go into the goal of one's own team.  Another Cantonese term beside that for "botched translation" that supposedly derives from the same football usage is wu1lung4*2 zi2 烏龍指 ("fat finger glitch" [in causing massive stock price fluctuations]).

Although this appears to be the most widely accepted explanation of the derivation of wūlóng 乌龙 in the sense of "bungle; botch; blunder", I'm rather dubious that it is the true origin of the expression.  My main reason for feeling doubt about this supposed derivation is that wu1lung4*2 doesn't sound a lot like "own", though I wouldn't rule out entirely that some Cantonese speaker(s) thought it did.

Victor Seow, who hails from Singapore, has another reason to harbor reservation over the "own goal" explanation:

I am a little suspicious since "own goal" as a term to mean scoring on one's own side (in a ball game) does not seem to be in use in the 19th century (based on a quick search through Google Books).

As so often is the case when there's a common expression for which a convincing derivation is lacking, Janet Williams (Geok Hoon 张玉云) points out that bǎi wūlóng 摆乌龙 ("commit a blunder") is regional / topolectal, so most people who use the expression simply have no clue what it originally meant.  Thus Janet's father, who spoke Hokkien, would shout enthusiastically wūlóng qiú 烏龍球! ("flub!") wūlóng qiú 烏龍球! ("flub!") while watching football, without worrying how "black dragon" came to have that meaning.

When someone bungles a translation from Chinese to English, it is customary nowadays to refer to the result as "Chinglish", a term with which we are quite familiar at Language Log.  Going the other direction, if someone messes up an English to Chinese translation, people will laugh at them as having made a wūlóng fānyì 乌龙翻译 ("botched translation").  However, since none of the major online translation services (Google, Bing, Baidu, and iciba) render wūlóng fānyì 乌龙翻译 correctly as "botched translation", rendering it instead as "Oolong translation" or some variant thereof, I am inclined to believe that that this usage, wu1lung4*2 faan1jik6 烏龍翻譯 ("botched translation"), is a southern expression that has not yet been fully taken up into Mandarin.

A classic instance of such a wūlóng fānyì 乌龙翻译 ("botched translation") in Singapore, which supposedly has quite a history of such bungled translations, is Xiōngyálì guǐjié 匈牙利鬼节 ("Hungary Ghost Festival") for "Hungry Ghost Festival".  This occurred in a 2002 guidebook put out by the Singapore Tourism Office.

For an entertaining Cantonese sitcom episode on wu1lung4*2 faan1jik6 烏龍翻譯 ("botched translation"), watch this YouTube video.

[Thanks to Yilise]