Help me out with my tattoo!

[roddy]

get the tattoo guy to do you a nice dragon?

[adrianlondon]

Which IME produced that output string from "on the edge"?

The standard MS one (in Vista, although I think they're all the same).

[johnmck]

"On the edge" can also be used on its own, without "of":

Skydivers obviously must enjoy living on the edge.

Surely skydivers enjoy living *off* the edge.

[Christophe]

One piece of advice: find someone who has already successfully done Chinese or Japanese tattoos, so that you don't up with the kind of silly tattoos that you can find on http://www.hanzismatter.com/.

[johnmck]

The point I was trying to make is that some phases simply cannot be translated (this is why I suggested he tried to translate it into his mother tongue, Greek). The reason they cannot be translated is that that the concept may not exist in the other people's culture.

I remember 20 years ago when the phrase "on the edge" first appeared, having great difficulty explaining it to my parents. When I explained it mean "extreme living" they could not see the point of making this distinction or why anyone should want to us this phrase.

Here in France people use phases in English because the concept does not exist in France or is a recent anglo-saxon import to the French culture.

e.g.

"start-up" (the concept of young people setting-up small companies is new here)

"Just do it" (My boss heard this on a Nike advert and thinks it sounds cool, to him it means to do something in a motivated manner, the nearest French translation would be "Tais-toi et travailles" (Shut-up and work))

Of course going in the other direction there is:

"La creme de la creme"

"Democracy"

"VavaVoom VavaVoom"

etc ...

[Guest realmayo]

Hmm, what's VavaVoom in Chinese I wonder?

[johnmck]

This process of copying new concepts and words from other languages occurs everywhere and is very obvious in Chinese as the copying is on a phonetic basis and the meaning of the characters is clearly irrelevant to the meaning of the word. One example is 咖啡 and a more disturbing one is 海洛因 - heroin. My history is very poor (I know nothing about the Opium wars) but this appears to imply that heroin was imported to China, are the characters for heroin evidence that it was unknown in China until the Opium wars?