Chinese speakers please help

[Butterlover1]

子 供

My daughter got a tattoo at the weekend and she's done some research after the event (would have been more useful beforehand) and is now panicking that the Chinese characters are just nonsense

Can anyone help with an accurate translation?

She thought it was "find yourself" but is now worried its some nonsense.... Or worse!

On Google translate it says it means 'child offering'

Cut and pasted it to translation site

Yes, that's what we found too but not sure how accurate Google translate is for character based languages as opposed to alphabet based languages.

My phones translation.

The first symbol is definitely 'child'. It's the same in Japanese (kodomo).

Just asked a friend. He says they are real characters but odd combination. The 1st character is part of the word for ‘child’ and the 2nd is kinda like ‘provide’. Maybe ask some other people if they have come across it - my friend is in the older generation.

Well, if nothing else, we live and learn, and / or tattoo cover-ups or removals are relatively cheap and easy these days.

A acquaintance of mine had some godawful faux-Latin phrase tattooed on their back. We were at a party with a classical scholar who translated it correctly, and it was about as close to 'chicken fried rice with chips' as you can imagine, but in Latin.

TOP TIP: if you are permanently decorating your body with a language that you neither speak nor understand, get a native speaker or scholar to check it - in triplicate - first.

Looking again I think the two symbols combined mean 'children' in Japanese.

Looks like it's possibly a mistake between 'zi' 自 oneself and 'zi' 子 child/ thing. My Chinese dictionary doesn't have anything in it for this particular combination.

japaneseparticlesmaster.xyz/kodomo-in-japanese/?amp

It means "child" in Japanese. It is pronounces kodomo

It could mean "children" as well as "child"

Children? Oh dear! That could give the VERY wrong impression....

My Japanese friend says it means children in Japanese

If nothing else it’s a good lesson not to get stuff you don’t understand permanently etched on yourself (and I say that as someone with tattoos)

In Japanese it’s Kodomo, children

I've not seen these two characters together in Simplified Chinese. Did they think she wanted something like "子贡" (Zi gong) which is like a follower of Confucius? Alternatively maybe it is something different in Japanese (I don't read that).

Yep, that's kodomo in Japanese - just means child.

No idea if it would make sense in Chinese - pretty sure that the first character would still mean child but don't know about the Second one.

Yes, child or children. Both.

What does she think it means?!

I guess you could have worse things tattooed onto you, but I hope that she has learned a lesson to check next time so that she knows exactly what she's doing before she does it!

At the bare minimum, knowing what language it's in would be a good start!

I know! Ridiculous 😂

It's only small and on her ribs so isn't publicly visible.....

One thing's for sure it doesn't say "find yourself" as she'd hoped. We'll work something out to get it sorted but I think there's a pretty good life lesson on it for her around less speed more haste. It was dreamed up on Friday with a friend and done on Saturday.

My brother speaks ok Chinese but not fluent but this is what he said

"You know I'm not fluent, but I can tell it's jibberish. 子 as far as I know is always at the end of a word, it's a word ending like -tion or -any in English, so it's really weird to see it at the start.
Child is 孩子, son is 儿子, so I can see why people are translating it as child.
The second character I don't know what it is or anything about it.

Also, if it's meant to be "find yourself" it should really contain 你 "ni" (self/you)."

Hope that helps!

I speak both Chinese and Japanese. It's Japanese word rather than Chinese, means child/children