Hi all, new here. Found via some internetting today that Haolailh label, if made in China, could have been aimed for Arabic market? Hao means 'good' in Chinese and 'lailah' means "night" in Arabic. Given that label was in pyjamas I believe, this seems quite a plausible translation, especially if made in China and they mispelled Lailah as Lailh. What do you think? Might have similar translations in other languages too, but these are the ones I came across
Hello, Enygma. Your post interests me because I have been teaching in language schools for a number of years, dealing with people from all sorts of linguistic and cultural backgrounds. I am not familiar at all with Chinese, though I do know some Arabic and 'Lailah' is certainly a word for night. Not sure where the child and the pineapple would come into that, but that's something else!
One general thing I would say about translations is that we have to remember that as native English speakers - as most of us are on this board - we are looking at things from an English mindset.
How a native speaker of a different language, be it Chinese or any other language , might hear, interpret, or choose to render in transliterated form words foreign to them, is another matter entirely.
We have to know a great deal about the linguistic and cultural nuances and sensitivities that relate to all the particular languages involved in an exercise like that to be able to make sense of the logic behind it all. Different alphabets can have letters that represent sounds unique to that language and that don't relate directly or even indirectly to letters in other alphabets, so even at a very basic level it's not a simple exercise.
So in other words, I think it is extremely difficult for an English speaker who does not know Chinese well to guess at what a Chinese speaker - who may or may not have been properly familiar with Arabic, who knows - may have been thinking with regard to the word Haolaith, Lailah - or anything else.
