We love Chinglish, so it's with a heavy heart that we report China has standardized restaurant menus in Beijing in preparation for the Olympics. That means no matter where you go, you'll know what you're ordering. (And doesn't that take some of the fun out of a trip to Asia?)
There will be no more "husband and wife's lung slice," reports Reuters: The dish is now rendered "beef and ox tripe in chili sauce." And don't even think of ordering "bean curd made by a pock-marked woman"; that's now officially known as "mapo tofu."
Actually, there is one change we can appreciate. We probably would never order the "chicken without sexual life," but we'd definitely go for some "steamed pullet."
The notoriously hilarious website Signspotting has just relaunched, featuring even more photos of ridiculous Chinglish, poorly worded bathroom placards and unfortunately named restaurants. (Dinner at Phat Phuc Noodle Bar, anyone?) The revamped site now lets you rate every sign, making it into a veritable Hot or Not for semioticians.
It can also net you some travel cash. Every week, site photo editor Doug Lansky sifts through dozens of entries to pick the best sign and pays the photographer $50, just like that. Really awesome signs can even earn round-the-world tickets on Star Alliance; so far six have been awarded and Lansky hopes to hand out another next month.
In the meantime, he's organizing an exhibition in Stockholm of some of the best Signspotting has to offer. The outdoor show in Kungsträdgården Park runs July 5-20.
We've had plenty of experience with seeing those pictures of weird Chinglish: the supposedly helpful signs and directions across China that are so badly translated we have no idea what they mean.
Over at Peter Greenberg's blog they've taken the helpful next step of explaining what instructions like "Unrecycling" and "No turning over" actually mean. While it's sometimes a bit of a letdown to learn that the original Chinese meaning behind these odd phrases is usually very ordinary--"no turning over", for example, was just a mistranslation of "no climbing"--the info still makes for some pretty hilarious reading.
Our personal favorite is from a sign near the Terracotta Army site in Xian that "Asks you on own initiative to walk according to the scenic areaturnover line"; if you translate the Chinese, it simply says "Please follow the marked path through the scenery." Of course.
We'd always thought that airline pilots had to learn a bit of English to get a licence, but it turns out that less than 10% of Chinese pilots meet the English standards of international aviation regulations.
With the Beijing Olympics coming up (it seems to be the impetus for pretty much everything in China these days), the Chinese civil aviation authority is trying to boost this percentage. The deputy aviation minister had this to say:
I hope those comrades who have the wrong thinking drop their illusions, don't wait around and don't rely on others, grasp the present good conditions for studying English and dare to fulfill their responsibilities. This will be long, hard, comprehensive work.
So next time you're flying in China, check if your pilot has dared to learn English.
With the 2008 Beijing Olympics drawing overwhelmingly nearer, China is getting really serious about fixing the Chinglish problem. The Chinese authorities really want you to understand what you read when you travel around Beijing between sports events.
They've now gone so far as to make the major decision to turn every Water Closet into a toilet, having decided
In many Western countries they don't use the term W.C. at all ... Because in English, it's equivalent to what we would call in China an outhouse, and is a rather crude slang term.
News to us, but what concerns us much more than whether they call a bathroom a WC or a toilet is all the "English" that we just can't understand at all. Literal translations of restaurant dishes could have us eating meals like "ants climbing the tree" or "mixed elbow with garlic mud", both of which like they might induce a visit to the WC--sorry, we mean the toilet.
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by pbb
