Anyone voting for sticky rice?

It seems in the last presidential election Boston poll workers may have been mismarking the ballots of Asian voters who didn't know English. So this time the U.S. Justice Department is ordering Boston to print Chinese ballots in some precincts.

The trouble is, Chinese language is not phonetic. Each character represents a word, not a sound. So names have to be transliterated. That's where you use Chinese characters representing words whose sounds are pronounced like the syllables of the name.

With me so far?

But when you translate what you transliterate, the result is pretty weird. Here's how some candidate names come out.

Barak Obama: Oh Intellectual Overcome Profound Oh Gemstone
Mitt Romney: Sticky Rice Clear Nun
Fred Thompson: Fortune Virtue Soup
Tommy Thompson: Beautiful Soup
Hillary Clinton: Upset Stomach

And it gets worse. China has more than one language, and those languages have dialects. So while in Mandarin Obama may be "Profound Oh Gemstone," in Cantonese it comes out "Oh Bus Horse." Or read differently, "Europe Pulling Horse."

It's all in the translation.