Dan asks what the Japanese means on this poster (lower right corner). It includes both Japanese and English versions, but Dan suspects the translation isn't very exact and wonders what it really says.

I got it worked out that the Japanese is:

ポイ捨て禁止ポスター.

子どもが絵筆で,

大人をしかっている.

The English given was:

Posters saying "Don't litter with cigarette butts" are like children scolding adults with paintbrushes."

Unfortunately, my ability to plink along with the dictionary and a degree of inspiration has failed me. I've got the following down:

子ども kodomo == child
大人 otona == adult
スター posutaa == poster
禁止 kinshi == inhibit
絵筆 efude == paintbrush (with で de explicitly appended?)

I have an intuition that しかっている shikatteiru means "is futile" or implies something along those lines, but I'm probably wrong.

I can't figure out why boi at the beginning is in katakana. I also can't find it in the dictionary. I'm thinking that boi is a slang term for a cigarette butt, which is why it's followed by 捨て "discard, throw away" (and also why there's nothing else in the entire poster that refers to tobacco). If so, then the first sentence would be "cigarette butt discarding inhibition poster (some implied verb)".

The impression I get is that what the thing is really saying is, "A poster forbidding littering with cigarette butts is like a child punishing an adult by striking with a paintbrush." Which is a rather peculiar simile, and an even stranger thing to put on a poster of this kind.

UPDATE: shikatteiru is driving me nuts. Given that shika means "nothing but" I wonder if this really means "is no better than" or "is no more effective than".

Use of ga instead of wa after kodomo changes the emphasis. Updated guess: "A poster forbidding littering with cigarette butts: It's as useless as an adult being spanked with a paintbrush by a child."

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 06:09 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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