Civilized dog
Language Log 2025-01-04
The large characters say:
wénmíng yǎng gǒu
文明养狗
"raise [your] dog [in a] civilized [manner]
This one is difficult for the machine translators to deal with.
The fine print says:
qǐng jíshí qīnglǐ chǒngwù páixiè wù
请及时清理宠物排泄物
"Please clean up your pet's excrement promptly"
The machine translators do a credible job with this one.
We've had countless variations on "civilization" + "urination / defecation" in the China department of Language Log. See "Selected readings" for a bare sample.
Selected readings
- "Be civilized when you urinate" (7/22/23) — with extensive bibliography (see especially the last comment of the last item, which never ends), the famous "Toilet Revolution!!" (11/26/17) — Xi Jinping's pet project
- "Please micturate in the urinal" (4/19/15)
- "No shitting here" (10/10/15)
- "Scoop the poop" (4/15/15)
- "Mandarin morphosyllabic annotation of a Taiwanese sign" (5/13/19)
Of the numberless relevant posts, these are just a few of my favorites.