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'Chinglish' confounds teacher
24/01/2007 14:11 - (SA)
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| An example of Chinglish (Chinese English) posted by a traveller on the Lonely Planet website (Photo: lonelyplanet.com) |
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Beijing - Welcome to China, where the slippery are very crafty, you must receive strangers carefully and the polices warmly warn people not to drive tiredly.
Confused? Amused? Beijing teacher Liu Yongli is simply embarrassed.
He has spent the last three years photographing 1 000 or so
examples of poor, misleading or just plain mysterious English
used on signs in the Chinese capital and a few other cities.
"English is widely studied in China, but it is remote from
daily life," said Liu, who teaches English at a Beijing
university. "A lot of the common English, and that used on
signs, does not appear in text books."
'Please cleaning'
He has collected examples of Chinglish signs that range
from poor grammar or spelling - "Please cleaning" and "Volunteer" - to the bizarre.
A favourite of his reads: "To take notice of safe, the slippery are very crafty". It is actually warning people to take care when using a sloping driveway up to a building.
And another: "On the taxi the guest stands forward". Liu suggests the simpler "Taxi pick-up point" would probably do.
One Beijing school even stuck up signs demanding students
"Speaking English Only!"
Lack of culture, and illiteracy
"I think this is a problem of lack of culture, of
illiteracy," Liu, 32, told Reuters. "Signs are supposed to
provide convenience. But these ones not only are inconvenient,
they cause trouble too."
Liu first noticed how bad Beijing's Chinglish problem was
in 2003 when studying for his masters degree. Then he got a
camera a year later and started snapping away. Today, he says,
he never leaves home without it.
"The government does not pay enough attention to this
problem," he said, sitting in his parents' apartment in a
dreary eastern Beijing suburb as aircraft preparing to land at
the nearby international airport droned overhead.
National standard is needed
Beijing has set up a body specifically to tackle the
problem ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games, but Liu said a
national standard was needed.
"The government should publish a standard book that people
and departments who make signs can refer to," he said.
"There's another laughable problem: China has a national
language commission, but it's only concerned with Chinese and
not English," Liu added.
Liu has attracted considerable local media attention for
his campaign, and likes taking reporters to see a large car
dealership where the word "exit" has been written "export"
throughout, the two words being identical in Chinese.
Other literal translations Liu has spotted are "oil gate"
for a gas or petrol station and "business suspended" for
closed.
'English is fashionable'
"There is a misunderstanding that you can just use a
dictionary, but translation is not like that," he complained.
"People often put English on signs for image reasons,
because they think English is fashionable," Liu said. "There
are lots of books on English available, but you can't find one
about English signage," he added. "There's no model for people
to follow."
- Reuters
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