Has anyone ever heard of 踢牙老奶奶(ti1 ya2 lao3 nai3 nai, “teeth-kicking grandma”)? It’s a Chinese web meme.

Apparently, the company that produced Neverwinter Nights wanted to market the game in Taiwan and hired a shady company to make a Chinese version. They decided to take all the English text, run it through a translation machine, and then choose random parts to clean up. The result was an unpopular game full of puzzling language and nonsensical phrases.

There’s this phrase in the game where someone is talking about reaching out for help from an old lady only to “get his teeth kicked in”. A translation bot would translate this literally and this is obviously an expression native to English, so people who played this game in Taiwan instantly became curious as to why an old grandma would deliberately choose to attack a man’s teeth. It got to be a big hit and a moral against thinking translation software is professional way to translate something.

In my cross-cultural and language experiences, I’ve always been comforted by the fact that for anything odd or annoying I encounter, there’s a corresponding thing in my country of origin. So for every English T-shirt I see with something nasty or just wrong in China or Taiwan, I imagine guy in the US getting the character for stupid permanently tattooed on his arm. It really pleased me then to find out that Taiwan has something that corresponds to the “all your base are belong to us” phenomenon.