Engrish Corner

Chinese and English are two very different languages. So different, that translating from one to the other gets pretty rough. Fortunately this is pretty humorous. Sometimes just plain ridiculous. On little signs or menus it’s usually just funny and entertaining, but other times we’ll see some product that is mass produced with such a poor translation that it begs the question- did the person in charge of translating not have one single native English speaking contact? Just one that he call in a favor to do a quick “once over”? Or if he didn’t, then how about anyone at the company? No? Ok, well how about someone who has learned English then? No? Ok, a dictionary? Google translate? There has to be some way to check the translation before they slap it on thousands of products!

Well, the “engrish” is always fun to spot and try to deduce the meaning. Most of the time we don’t have our camera with us. It’s usually on little things like at the grocery store, a restaurant or a passerby’s shirt- so we miss capturing the moments. We have collected a few while we’ve been here that I can share. They are definitely not the best ones we’ve seen/read. I’ll keep updating it as we get more (just like the “What’s for Dinner?” post). Enjoy.

I think I’ve mentioned that Pizza Hut is one of the nicest restaurants in town. You almost feel like you should dress up to eat there. It’s pretty classy, as shown below.

This area is on campus. That set of stairs is higher than it looks. Seems like a good place to put the “Department of Retired Personnel”. You want to retire? Well, walk up and down this set of stairs a few times and you may want to reconsider.

Clothing has some of the best engrish screw-ups here. I just passed someone the other day wearing a shirt with the notorious puma on it, but with a misspelled logo which read “PAMU”. I bet this goes both ways; Americans are always trying to buy shirts with Chinese characters or getting Chinese tattoos. I’m sure that our translations don’t make any sense either. Chinese people must think we’re idiots. Regardless, it seems like if you are going to base your living on copying, producing and selling fake name-brand clothing, you would at least double-check to see if you put the letters in the right order, no? Not only are there great misspelled fake name-brand clothes everywhere, but a lot of shirts have little sentences written in English that are completely meaningless, silly and would be embarrassing for any native speaker to be caught wearing. Below is someone wearing his expensive and legit “Dolce and Gabbana” wife-beater.

The Chinese are concerned about the environment, at least in theory, not so much in practice. Below is a series of signs plastered all over the little “forest walk” here on campus.

1. “No Smoking”- makes sense. I’m in a forest, probably shouldn’t light one up here. Got it.

2. “Flammable Solid”- what’s flammable? The trees or the sign? Ok…now that I know it’s flammable should I light it on fire or..?