Beef Animal & Friends: A Meme-Type Thingy

Reading Jon Bois’s recent article on the collapse of Andruw Jones’s career reminded me of two things:

1. I’ve wasted my life. (Jon Bois is three years younger than me. Jon Bois is awesome, and I am fine with awesome people being younger than me, but I had been assuming that, because he is so awesome, that Jon Bois was older than me, and I was overcome with existential dread, until I remembered that being overcome with existential dread is meaningless.)
2. Mistranslated things are often very amusing.

If you don’t want to click on the link to Bois’s article (and you really should: it’s a very good read), I’ll tell you what the title and lead-in reveal: Andruw Jones has a tattoo on his neck of Chinese characters that were supposed to mean “Bull” but instead translate more closely (and perhaps more appropriately, as Bois points out) as “Beef Animal.”

So, I set out to see what other baseball nicknames I might hilariously mistranslate using Bing Translator — you know, just in case other players might want to get more appropriately [mis]translated tattoos of their own.

Let us meme!

[Important Amendment: El Oso Blanco]

Pronk (Project Donkey)

Cargo

Base Clogger

Big Papi

Bossman Junior

Important Amendment: El Oso Blanco, Communist

Running the English translation of Evan Gattis’s nickname, El Oso Blanco (The White Bear), through the Bing Translator and retranslating back to English was disappointingly direct and accurate. However, using Babylon and translating from the Spanish to Chinese and then to English resulted in something deeply troubling, though it’s likely just the result of a glitch, or something.

Witness:

El Oso Blanco