Lost in Transliteration: Do Not Litter Signs in Mysore

At SKAR, it appears that 'Do not Litter' signs are a great source of inspiration.

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With apologies to the Chinese signs featured elsewhere on this site, the signs are actually quite readable in Kannada. It's the act of transliterating idioms from one language to another of a different family that produces these spectacular results.

With apologies to everybody else, this is 50% of the same "trick" that propelled Salman Rushdie's language use to fame. Except in Rushdie's case, the trick provokes learned papers in learned journals.

From an article in Poetics Today


Postcolonial Literature and the Magic Radio: The Language of Rushdie's Midnight's Children
Much postcolonial literature depends on unacknowledged processes of translation working like the "radio" in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children that magically renders all Indian languages intelligible to the children of midnight. It is surprisingly difficult to determine what languages the characters in Rushdie's novel are actually speaking; though there can be found in the novel several of the strategies Meir Sternberg identifies with translational mimesis (the representation of one language within another), the material substance of English is important in much of its dialogue. Arguably, the English language itself is the magic radio by means of which meaning becomes accessible in Midnight's Children—and Rushdie's own comments reveal ultimately that he evaded the issue of the underlying languages the characters are speaking.


What and all these radios say, ya. Simp-simply giving gyan left, right and center