A series of earlier Language Log posts have discussed the curious phenomenon seen in the grocery-store sign on the right: absurdly crude English mistranslations in bizarrely inappropriate contexts.
In "Gan: whodunnit, and how, and why?" (5/31/2006), I explained one of the sources of this phenomenon: several Chinese characters pronounced GAN1 or GAN4 -- and meaning such widely disparate things as "dry," "calendrical sign," "to do," and much else beside -- all got collapsed into one simplified character: ä±. This has led to enormous confusion, especially when people who know next to no English rely on machine translation software to convert Chinese into English. The chaos caused by this combination of circumstances is vastly exacerbated by the fact that this little, three-stroke symbol also has a vulgar meaning when pronounced in the fourth tone, GAN4, namely "fuck," which is probably an extension of the regular sense of "do." Because GAN4 ("do") and GAN1 ("dry") are now both written with that little, three-stroke character, the damage is compounded by the enormous range of intended senses of GAN1/4 ("dry," "do," "act," "work," "undertake," "shield," "have to do with; be concerned with," "edge of a body of water," "be rude, impolite, blunt," "embarrass or annoy," "give the cold-shoulder to," "empty, hollow," measure word for a group of people, "trunk, stem, main part," "cadre," "competent, capable, able, talented," "go bad," "be a disaster," etc.), all of which are capable of coming out of the translation software as "fuck."
People who see signs employing the f-word all over China, even in large stores and fancy restaurants, are not only aghast, they wonder how the dickens such a gross mistranslation could have originated and proliferated. I believe that the explanation given in the previous paragraph adequately and accurately accounts for the origin of the basic GAN1/4 = "fuck" mistranslation. The question that remains, then, is how did this virus spread? Theories abound, to say the least. I have intelligent colleagues who believe that naughty people do this on purpose just to scandalize customers and clients. Others hold that it is done to make English look like an uncouth language. Still others maintain that devious foreign translators plant these mistranslations all over the place to make Chinese look stupid and crude. And there are so many additional theories that attempt to account for the GAN1/4 = "fuck" misrendering that I can't keep track of them.