Easiness schlep
This is a Yilida YD-10000. It is a flashlight. In fact, it is a special flashlight. In addition to the classic spot light, it also has a flashing yellow light (for emergencies) and a siren (for more serious emergencies). It is owned by a friend of a friend, who brought it with him when he came to the village to fish. He was throwing cast nets well before dawn, so his need for a flashlight makes sense. He is also a police officer, so his need for a yellow emergency flashing light and siren also sort of make sense (if seemingly impractical in their application in the field).
What I liked about this flashlight is the labeling. Now, I must confess to an appreciation for awkward English-as-a-third-language translations when I stumble upon them. However, the story which this flashlight tells is a little more complex.
Most interesting here is the last feature in the list, “easiness schlep.”
Now schlep, or sometimes shlep (or sometimes שלעפּ), is a word of Yiddish origin (from: shlepn) which usually means to drag, to carry or to pull. It is from the German: schleppen, to drag. Though in Americanized Yiddish usage, it can also be used to mean to travel somewhere with connotations of difficulty (as in, “to schlep across town”). For non-Yiddish speakers, like myself, this is not a particularly arcane word. It is one of many Yiddish words which have made their way into English. However, it is a colloquialism. And it is not so common as to be a synonym of drag or carry. Thus, this flashlight caught my eye.
I took this picture late in 2007 in Kampong Thom Province. But I still wonder about the engineers and graphics department at the Yilida factory. How did schlep make it onto that label? Where had the label translator learned his or her English? Might they have lived in New York for a time, or someplace else where there are many people who either speak Yiddish at home or (ab)use Yiddish colloquialisms? Might their teacher have learned from someone (like myself) who was fond of Yiddish? What about their teacher’s teacher? I have certainly seen linguistic ticks (word preferences, grammatical errors and sundry misappropriations) transferred across generations of English teachers. All I can do now is speculate. I’ll never know. But I still marvel at how a word from a language spoken mainly by Jews of Eastern European origin (with speakers numbering a little over 3 million people) found its way onto a Chinese-made flashlight, and then into the hands of a police officer in rural Cambodia. No, it is not the first example of nifty global linkages which I have ever seen. But it is indeed one of my favorites.
Disclamer: I am no expert on Yiddish. I just live in Brooklyn and have read a couple of books by Leo Rosten (one of which I purchased in Phnom Penh!). So if any of you Yiddish speakers or Chinese flashlight engineers out there have further insights on this, feel free to share.
Comment by JimSh
17 January 2009 @ 4:02 pm
From what I know about English translating in China, there are a number of electronic dictionaries and computer programs into which you type the Chinese word and it gives you what it considers the English equivalent(s). I’m sure you’ve seen it too, but a lot of signs translated into English in China get translated into a strange scramble of words from such methods. The fact that it says “powerful-weak” I’m guessing is its bragging of a high and low setting, not of both superior power and weakness to other brands. The fact is, things such as this export to Cambodia and English signs in China is that they won’t typically ever be seen by native-English speakers anyway (or at least not acted upon), which eliminates much need for accuracy. My guess is schlep somehow made it into a dictionary and came up for whatever word they were looking up–maybe the Chinese words for “easy” and “carrying”. Who knows though–your theory is more fun.