English in China - Part 1

Any Westerner who has much experience traveling in China has seen firsthand the problems created by attempts to translate Chinese into English. In defense of the non-native English speakers charged with this potentially embarrassing task, English is, of course, in so many ways a vastly different language from Chinese. Still, it’s hard not to chuckle at some of the crude, inappropriate, and unintentionally hilarious results of their attempts: a phenomenon known as "Engrish." In my travels I’ve come across many instances of Engrish, which I’ve begun to document, especially as the quality of public English translations in China improves and Engrish begins to disappear.

Public signage is probably the main source of Engrish:

"May joy be with you
The smile will be with us!"
Can't we ALL smile?
(photo by CIT)


"Caution, slip!" Wait – so I'm
supposed to slip?
(photo by CIT)


"Safety exports"
(photo by CIT)


"Ganzhi Blind a Health Chamber"
(photo by CIT)


Rock out with "Uncle Rock"!
(photo by CIT)

There’s actually an interesting story behind "Uncle Rock."

I also enjoyed some of the English names of formations in the Jiuxiang Caves near Kunming that we came across on our trip to Yunnan last November:

The world-famous
"Feudal Headman Castle"...
(photo by CIT's Anna Qin)


...and "Posture in Lying of an Old
Immortal Man After Drunkenness"
(photo by CIT)

In some cases in which you would have to nitpick to find fault with grammar and usage, such as this sign in the Stone Forest area, English translations can still have unintended connotations. In that social context, a place where many ethnic minorities (non-Han Chinese) reside, the use of the word "civilized" has an uncomfortable authoritarian undertone for some Westerners that is completely missing from the Chinese version, which is an innocuous call for everyone to keep the area clean:

"The Stone Forest, our home,
shall be beautiful and civilized."
(photo by CIT)

Another common source of Engrish is literal translations of the names of dishes whose historical and cultural background are unknown outside China. The menu photos below are from a restaurant in Lijiang and a dumpling restaurant in Shanghai (for the record, the food at both of these places was absolutely delicious):

"Pure tribute crab dumpling"
(photo by CIT)


The ever-popular dish "The millet
fries the salty duck egg spicily"
(photo by CIT)

You gotta love how the attributive "Yunnan" becomes the subject of the sentence "Yunnan slightly fries the meat" (perhaps better rendered as "Yunnan-style pan-fried meat"), and a similar mistake results in "The millet fries the salty duck egg spicily." If I didn’t eat a mostly vegetarian diet, I would have loved to get crazy with the "Wild fung chicken soup." Give credit to the owners of the restaurant for finding all of the more-appropriate standard translations they could for the other dishes, however.

Then there are the completely strange or unexpected instances of English you encounter randomly, such as this appropriately-named store and the mystifying brand name on the package below that I came across in an upscale hotel bathroom (note the hilarious cartoon image holding an apple):

"P.I.M.P": The latest in hip-hop fashions
(photo by CIT)


"Donless"?
(photo by CIT)

Even as Westerners enjoy a few laughs at the expense of these hapless translators, we shouldn’t be too smug. Most young people in China are diligently studying English, and in the future there will be a much larger number of Chinese whose English is not just good, but in many ways better than most Americans’. And as China’s presence in the world continues to grow, no doubt many non-native speakers of Chinese will be faced with the opposite task, resulting in laughably crude and inappropriate Chinese translations—a phenomenon that might be dubbed 憃文. (If you can read Chinese, I think you’ll get the joke; if you can't, well, that’s what it’s like to be on the other side.) No doubt I’ve been an unwitting perpetrator myself on many occasions, but fortunately my Chinese friends have usually been too nice to give me too hard a time about it.