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Chaos Defrost

posted by DL Byron on April 04, 2008

I noticed the Chaos Defrost option on the microwave and thought that’s either a Dr. Evil setting, some new way high-tech way to heat up food, or they meant “choose defrost.” The possible result of Chaos Defrost is that all the food comes our scrambled.

chaos_defrost.jpg

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Apr 05  |  anders said:

My chinese is very rusty, but the literal character by character translation of the characters next to “Chaos Defrost”, “巧速解冻” is:

  • 巧 - qiǎo - skillful; timely
  • 速 - sù - fast; rapid; quick
  • 解 - jiě - to separate; to divide; to break up; to loosen
  • 冻 - dòng - to freeze

解冻 is a compound word that means “thaw” or “defrost”. So the full thing would be some sort of “smart/rapid defrost” mode. It looks like instead of translating 巧速, they actually did a sort of messed up transliteration of the sounds of the characters into English. ‘Q’ in pinyin is pronounced with a sort of ‘ch’ sound, so it would roughly be “chee ow sue” which could kind of get you “Chaos” if you were unaware that we pronounce the “Ch” in chaos as a hard ‘K’ sound.

It’s funny to see the transliteration going this way. It’s common for foreign words and names to enter Chinese as a jumble of characters that kind of resemble the original sound, but Chinese -> English is usually translated by the meaning of the characters rather than the sound.

Apr 06  |  DL Byron said:

Anders,

Thank you! We’ve seen many funny translations; especially in Taipei and my latest fave is this T-Shirt

Feb 28  |  Dr Evil said:

Nope, it really means chaos defrost, chaos theory is used to provide a more effective defrost function.

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