Chinglish continues to entertain visitors to China.
You arrive in a new country, travel-stained and slightly jet-lagged, head out of the airport to a blissfully quiet room with a comfortable bed. You shut the door to the world and flick on the telly, only to be greeted with an ad for… hold your breath, Ass Glue!
“My weary mind instantly began thinking why the Chinese would need a product like this,” said my friend amidst howls of merriment as he narrated the story, “until of course I realised that this must be one of those Chinese-to-English translations that, let’s just say, didn’t work so well!” In the course of his travels in China, he said, he’d also come across Libido, a Chinese soda and Swine, a local chocolate.
Chinglish, as it is fondly known, has delighted travellers and expats in China for decades. Language experts say that since Chinese is a tonal language in which the same words pronounced differently also may have completely different meanings — literal translations from English often produce howlers. Here are some of the better ones: A sign in a café greeting Western visitors with the words: “Welcome big nose friends”; a park in Beijing named “Racist Park” (better translated as the Park of Ethnic Minorities) and the interesting admonition — “Don’t forget to carry your thing”.
It was, thus, no wonder that when I went to China recently, I was looking forward to my own Chinglish experiences. “You won’t have to hunt for them,” said my friend, the old China hand, “Chinglish is everywhere!” Imagine my surprise (and disappointment) then, when I reached Beijing and was told that the Beijing Municipal Tourism Bureau had decided to do away with all the Chinglish signs to prepare for the 2008 Olympics. Apparently, it had even given city restaurants a list of proper English names for the most commonly mistranslated items. How sad. I would have liked to order a “burnt lion’s head” (read pork meatballs) to go with some “steamed crap” (crab, of course). But in the next few days, I discovered underneath Beijing’s polished world city exterior, this delightful version of the Queen’s English was alive and kicking.
The day we arrived in Beijing, we did what most tourists do — we went shopping. When I bought some beautiful tablecloth at a shop, the shopkeeper gave me his card, exhorting me to come another time. Every word on that card was in English, yet it made no sense to me. It said, “Manage Item. Wholesale to Make to order... Craft drive. Depend on the mat. On the bed thing.” There was more in what looked like Russian — and just as incomprehensible! Apparently, many Chinese rely on computers to translate phrases into English and this certainly seemed like a translation untouched by human hands. Another time, we walked in to a restaurant and found that like most others in Beijing, this one also had a pictorial menu. While there were no “burnt lions heads” on offer, the day’s special was an unappetising sounding “dreaded veal cutlet”. Guess the person who made the menu, confused ‘b’ with ‘d’.
Days later, we found ourselves (completely by accident, as we were perpetually lost in Beijing) on the shores of Bei Hai, the beautiful lake flanking the Forbidden City. It was obviously a favourite local picnic spot, overrun with couples, older people, walkers and kids on skates. No wonder that the signs by the waterline exhorted people to “slip carefully”. Inside the Forbidden City, right at the end was the Imperial Garden with low man-made hillocks and a sign: “Perilous hills. No climbing please”.
Also Read
As we chatted with the (very) few locals who spoke English in Beijing, I realised that many young urban people in China equate speaking English with being cosmopolitan. Many of them have chosen English names for themselves because they’re easier to use on the Internet. I saw a television show while I was there, which featured a lady whose “English” name was “Samanfa”. Turned out she’d met someone called Samantha, but thought the ‘fa’ at the end sounded prettier! Incidentally, her dog’s English name was No No.
Then one day when we were lost as usual (who won’t be with a map in one language and signs in another) we met someone with a more common ‘English’ name. “Look!” I cried, when I came across a Kentucky Fried Chicken takeaway, “there’ll be people here who know English! Let’s ask them where we are!” So we walked in, and a staffer with a name tag that said “Susan” greeted us. Which was fine, except the staffer was male. He could speak a little English though, so he managed to give us directions. When I said “Thank you Susan,” he looked startled. “My name is Andy,” he said. I asked why he was wearing Susan’s tag, and he said with utmost surprise, “Oh…is that what it says? I just thought it looked nice, so I wore it!” I realised that just like we’d bought tea cups with some Chinese lettering without understanding what it meant (and it would probably serve us right if they translated into something dreadfully rude) — some Chinese apparently did exactly the same thing…
Also, because Chinese language is all about pronunciation, locals stare at you baffled if you attempt to use your little Chinese phrasebook on them. The result? Few understood my English or strange attempts at Chinese — and I didn’t understand their Chinese or their strange stabs at English. At the end of an immensely enjoyable week being lost in China, the conclusion I arrived at was that to the average English-speaking tourist, the Great Wall is merely a glorified fence they built to keep Mongolian pillagers out — the Greater Wall of China is the language divide that separates the Chinese from the rest of the world.