# I was eating my mom and meat today.



## Messquito

Several days ago, 渡辺美優紀 posted on weibo in Chinese, "I was eating my mom and meat today," which I am sure there is an error in translation.
So can you guess what she might have put in the translator in Japanese? I am curious about what kind of sentence would be mistranslated like that.
ありがとうございます！


----------



## frequency

Obviously, she overtook protein.


Messquito said:


> I am curious about what kind of sentence would be mistranslated like that.


Do you mean you want to know the original Japanese sentence, of course?


----------



## Nino83

In Japanese と　can mean both "with" and "and" so maybe this is the reason of this mistake.
Kare wa tomodachi *to* sakana o tabeta.
He ate fish *and* friends.
He ate fish *with* friends. 

So the original sentence could be something like 今日はお母さんとお肉を食べていました。, probably.


----------



## SoLaTiDoberman

Nino83 is right!

今日はお母さんとお肉を食べていました。
I was eating meat with my mom today. 今日は、お母さんと、お肉を食べていました。
I was eating my mom and meat today.　今日は、お母さんとお肉を、食べていました。

今日は、お母さんとお父さんのお肉を食べました。The speaker and his/her mother are carnivores, or the speaker is a carnivore to eat his/her parents' meat.


----------



## Nino83

魚とチップスを食べてる。
本当に？魚もチップスを食べる？ 

(just kidding, the right word is フィッシュ・アンド・チップス )


----------



## Messquito

Thank you, guys! That was funny though, I'm wondering if this kind of ambiguity appears in Japanese jokes or comedies?


----------



## 森人さん

The sentence was translated literally, as a result the meaning did not come across correctly.


----------



## frequency

（人）と　～を　食べました is a common pattern, so we can understand it correctly. 
今日はお肉とお母さんを食べました。 100% means that she ate her mother.


----------



## Nino83

Hello, Messquito. 
I'm too curious. Could you write the Chinese translation of these two sentences?


----------



## Messquito

Thanks again, guys!


Nino83 said:


> Hello, Messquito.
> I'm too curious. Could you write the Chinese translation of these two sentences?


She wrote, 今天，吃著母親和肉。


----------



## frequency

I assume 母親和肉 means my mother and meat. What does the 著 mean?


----------



## Nino83

Messquito said:


> 今天，吃著母親和肉。


I read here that in Chinese "and" is identical to "with". Do 与，和 and 跟 mean both "and" and "with"?.
Is it a matter of word order in Chinese?
今天，我吃著母親和肉。
今天，我和母親吃著肉。


frequency said:


> （人）と　～を　食べました is a common pattern


Is this sentence less ambiguous?
今日は、お肉をお母さんと食べていました。
And, is this word order uncommon, in Japanese?

In many IE languages "with" can mean both と (comitative) and　で (instrumental) (map).


----------



## frequency

Nino83 said:


> 今日は、お肉をお母さんと食べていました。


This is fine and we can say so, too. Anyway お母さん_を_ isn't good.


----------



## Nino83

frequency said:


> This is fine and we can say so, too.


Thanks! Maybe it's better to use this word order when using on-line translators.


frequency said:


> Anyway お母さん_を_ isn't good.


It seems that google.translate doesn't agree. 
Are they encouraging cannibalism?


----------



## frequency

Nino83 said:


> Maybe it's better to use this word order when using on-line translators.


I guess you mean that we can avoid "お肉とお母さん", the direct object, by so doing.


Nino83 said:


> Are they encouraging cannibalism?


Yes. Do automatic translators usually have only one choice for one word? I still remember an auto translator said "She's a piece of fat now", not "She's fat now." It had the word 脂肪 only for the word "fat" and didn't have 太っている.


----------



## Nino83

frequency said:


> I guess you mean that we can avoid "お肉とお母さん", the direct object, by so doing.


The important thing is to avoid と in the middle, like in お母さんとお肉を, because it could be misunderstood as "and" by many automatic translators.


frequency said:


> Do automatic translators usually have only one choice for one word?


Maybe it could be but I don't know if this is the case. The strange thing is that the Japanese-English translation is right while the Japanese-Chinese one is wrong.
JP-EN 今日は、お母さんとお肉を食べていました。 => Today, I ate meat with my mother.
JP-MA 今日は、お母さんとお肉を食べていました。 => 今天，我在吃妈妈和肉。
Word order is similar in English and Mandarin Chinese so I don't understand why the two translations are so different.
This is a mistery.


----------



## Nino83

But if you put お母さんと at the end it "magically" becomes right.  
JP-MA 今日は、お肉をお母さんと食べていました。 => 今天，我和妈妈吃肉。


----------



## frequency

Then it recognised [お母さんとお肉], not [お母さんと][お肉を食べる].


----------



## Nino83

Yes, but only in the Japanese-Mandarin translation. 
It seems that google.translate works better with translations from a language to English but not from other languages to other languages.


----------

