It's from a piece of cloth art depicting a peacock. Sourced from somewhere in Vietnam around 1970 or so.

Have tried a few OCR engines but no luck so far. Originally thought it was in a Chinese dialect, then realized it may be written in in Chữ Nôm instead. Looks like very few people still understand Chữ Nôm but since it was based on Classical Chinese, perhaps there is hope.

Or maybe it's just in some variant of Chinese and the OCR engines I've used (for both simplified and traditional) haven't been able to read it due to the quality of the image?

I post this with the full understanding and expectation of getting trolled with fake translations. All I ask regarding these it that they at least be somewhat funny.

Here's the full piece of art if interested:

I think it says "Iron me!"

It says who gives a ****

"Becky! Please lemme smash!"

Hard to do a direct translation, but:

Its to do with celebrating an arranged marriage

It's the parents have picked the son-in-law who will be very good (eg wealthy, good personality) and it will be a good marriage

There is a story behind the words as well - there was a princess who was pregnant and had a daughter who was very pretty. the father said my daughter is very pretty and very smart so how can I choose someone worthy when so many men want to marry her.

So he got someone to paint a painting with peacocks, and each man gets two chances to shoot (bow and arrow) the peacocks' eyes in the painting.

100s tried but eventually a young king shot the arrow to hit the two eyes. That man then successfully married the princess and became the next king and lived happily etc

The characters are Chinese, but it's a phrase from around 500 years ago - it's hard to translate character for character

It's a menu:

WINGS - 10000 dongs

Also, I said dongs, teehee.

You can look up "General Dou Yi", this is probably the best link and explanation: https://www.theepochtimes.com/storie...n_1497636.html

The idiom is "que ping zhong xuan"; “screened by the peacock screen” meaning “being screened and picked.”

Alright, I was kidding. It's actually Japanese and it says "tiny charcoal bbq grill."

In all seriousness, ES's translation checks out? 雀 屏 中 选
Third character looks a lot different, but this is likely simplified?

“If you love something set it free. If it comes back it’s yours. If not, it was never meant to be.”

ESKiMO-SiCKNE5S - thank you so much! That was super helpful.

I ended up trying a few "draw a chinese character" websites, and also found out that Google translate supports drawing characters as well. Unfortunately I'm really bad at anything drawing related, but one of the websites did manage to figure out my mangled scrawling for the first two characters referred to bird and screen.

I'm still wondering what the last two characters are. The first two:

雀 - bird
屏 - screen

pop up based on my drawing input, and match the translation from ES, but I can't draw the second two to translate to anything.

The two that Garick listed:

中 选

don't quite look like either of the last two from the art.

Can't seem to get any character close to the third one. The closest I'm coming up with for the last one is:

老 - old
乞 - beg

BTW, we expect your ruling on best reference joke translation ITT once you are don't with t he actual sleuthing.

"Update your sailing thread"

"Peacock, same as chicken."

"Chuck's one to talk."

MLYLT.

Terribly sorry

Thank Mrs Eskimo haha

Because it's an idiom based on a storyline it doesn't really translate directly - it's hard to explain it clearly, think about trying to explain to someone "jack of all trades" or similar

1st character = peacock (lots of birds can be this character, but in this context with this storyline it means peacock)
2nd = screen, to confirm, this screen is the stitching artwork on a large flat panel, quite common in Asia
3rd = Spring
4th = Colour

3rd and 4th characters are together as "Spring Colour" which in this context means happy

to say peacock without context its kong que

https://youtu.be/mY9gVIcRkkI

Thanks yet again, ESKiMO-SiCKNE5S. And please pass along my thanks to Mrs Eskimo!

Once I had all 4 characters in unicode: 雀屏春色

雀 - bird
屏 - screen
春 - spring
色 - color




I was able to find other images as well. Some similar, and a couple that were the exact same piece. Even found one for sale:






Found that one by searching Baidu:



Also found a different person with the exact same translation question, albiet using a different piece of art:




And kept reading different variations of the same story that ES originally posted.


Mystery solved, thanks for the help. Mrs Eskimo is my hero for today.

Late to the thread, but Mrs Eskimo is entirely correct. Also a sidenote, dialect doesn't change the written text.