Elyse Sewell has some amusing pirate Arrested Development DVDs:

In Hong Kong, I bought a pirated box set of Arrested Development. You can watch it with Chinese or English subtitles.

Imagine you’re a poor sap working at the pirate DVD factory writing the Chinese subtitles for this show. There’s no Chinese alphabet, only ideograms, so when you have to subtitle a word like “Michael,” or “Lindsay,” or “Buster,” or “Warden Gentles,” the only thing you can do is pick out a couple of ideograms whose pronunciation roughly approximates the sound of the name.

So, you might pick the character “mai” and the character “ko.” It wouldn’t matter what the ideograms meant in Chinese as long as they sounded pretty much like “Michael” when read aloud.

Fine.

But this is a pirated DVD — whoever made it didn’t have access to the faithful English subtitles that would accompany a legitimate Arrested Development DVD. So they had to write their own at the pirate factory. And for some reason, they didn’t make the English subtitles using the audio from the show. They back-translated the Chinese subtitles.

Madcap hilarity via screencap ensues. Click through for giggles.