I am writing a paper about machine translation and I am looking for a phrase in Chinese that is ambiguous and cannot possibly be translated correctly without knowing the correct context.
I found this article about euphemisms in Chinese which mentions the phrase "见马克思" in the sense "to die".
Is this phrase really known/recognizable by an average Chinese person? If not, are there any better phrases with ambiguous meanings?
Sohu has a news article dated from 2020-07-26, with a sentence that reads:
腮部中弹，离大脑很近了，稍有不慎，杨勇恐怕就提前去见马克思了。
Here “见马克思” is used to mean “to die,” like what was mentioned in the question above.
The phrase in question is featured in a recent write-up by a large company that services the Chinese speaking world. I think it is fair to say that it is well known enough for the editors to leave it in without thinking that it would cause confusion for their audience.
The bigger problem I see with your question, though, is the fact that many machine translations use dictionaries and the phrase in question can be found in quite a few resources.
见马克思 can quickly be found in five Chinese-English dictionaries:
One Chinese-French dictionary:
And one Chinese-Chinese dictionary:
The longer term 去见马克思 can also ben found in one Chinese-German dictionary:
As far as I can tell they all contain the euphemistic definition, “to die.” It shouldn't be too hard for a well trained machine translation to be able to translate the phrase correctly with the right tools.
There are a lot of bad Chinese translations, seemingly curated by machine translators, online, i.e.: Bubbles | 20 of the Best (Worst?) Chinese Sign Translation Errors & 干 has always been an issue. You might find a more appropriate example in some of these resources.
No. The baseline is, the term "见马克思" is rarely used today. If used, usually not in a serious situation. It might also be found in historical texts or literature that reviews the points of view during that historical period.
Polite ways of mentioning people's death are:
他不在了 and 他走了are the examples you are looking for. These two expressions can only be translated as "death" in certain contexts.
PS: This question is too political or even religious to answer correctly. I would avoid deeper discussion on the origin and historical details.
No. This expression is understandable (given a clear context), but it's rarely used and very informal.
Yes, there are a lot. I think @River just gave a really good example: 他走了 could mean he has left or he has passed away, depending on the context.
Another example I can think of: 借 could mean lend as well as borrow. If you say 我借了他100块 we don't know if you lent 100 yuan to that person or if you borrowed 100 yuan from that person. If you say 我借了他100块，他说下个月还我 then the 借 here clearly means to lend. It's really challenging for a machine translator to get it right.
As of today (August 1st, 2020), both Google Translate and DeepL Translate (and Baidu Translate, too) are translating it wrong:
见马克思 probably only works in China. 见阎王 or 去世了 is much more common. 去世了 is more formal and respectful.
There is another very interesting sentence(slang) to describe someone has dead.
他去蘇州賣鴨蛋了。 (Translate "DIRECTLY" -> "He goes to Suzhou selling duck eggs." Suzhou is a city in Jiangsu province in China.)
I have a feeling that 百年之後 suite your need. 百年之後 have ambiguous meaning when you don't know primary meaning of this component. It can be interpreted differently between interpreting it literally and considering the meaning in addition to its literal meaning.
When we interpret 百年之後 literally. We get 百年 means "a hundred year." 之後 means "after". 百年之後 literally means "after a hundred year."
When we consider the primary meaning of 百年之後. It means "after someone's death."
