Beware of Slippy: For Shanghai, Chinglish is no laughing matter

May 02, 2010
By Prisma News
Category:

Until recently, native English speakers could be guaranteed a chuckle or two as they traveled the streets of Shanghai, for the city was awash in mistranslations of English that some call “Chinglish.” To give you an idea, check out these beauties:

  • Cash Recycling Machine
  • Monolithic tree mushroom stem squid
  • Urine district
  • Racist Park

Andrew Jacobs reports in the New York Times that Shanghai, nervously anticipating millions of foreign visitors during Expo 2010, decided to get serious about purging Chinglish from its midst, whether the malapropisms appeared in bank lobbies, on street signs or on restaurant menus. The effort echoed Beijing’s movement to clean up its English-language signage ahead of last summer’s Olympic ceremonies.

But why did Shanghai have so much poorly-translated English in the first place? One culprit was a popular but flawed electronic translation dictionary. But according to Jeffrey Yao, one of the translators involved in the Chinglish purge, the errant translations were often the result of a certain Chinese penchant for poetry:

‘(Yao) has mixed feelings, noting that although some Chinglish phrases sound awkward to Western ears, they can be refreshingly lyrical. “Some of it tends to be expressive, even elegant,” he said, shuffling through an online catalog of signs that were submitted by the volunteers who prowled Shanghai with digital cameras. “They provide a window into how we Chinese think about language.”

He offered the following example: While park signs in the West exhort people to “Keep Off the Grass,” Chinese versions tend to anthropomorphize nature as a way to gently engage the stomping masses. Hence, such admonishments as “The Little Grass Is Sleeping. Please Don’t Disturb It” or “Don’t Hurt Me. I Am Afraid of Pain.” ‘

NYT: “Shanghai Is Trying to Untangle the Mangled English of Chinglish”

Creative Commons photo credit: Augapfel

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