OLYMPICS/ Facelift
Beijing says goodbye to 'Chinglish'
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2007-09-28 17:40
BEIJING -- With the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games just around the corner, the Chinese are waging a war on baffling English translations popularly known as "Chinglish" as part of the capital city's facelift.
A sign warning of a wet floor in a Beijing shopping mall was translated as "The Slippery Are Very Crafty", and a theme park dedicated to China's ethnic minorities had been called "Racist Park."
"Some of the translations are confusing or even offensive to foreign visitors," said Chen Lin, a consultant with the Beijing Speaks Foreign Languages Program. "As Beijing is developing to an international metropolis, we must change this situation."
The Beijing municipal government launched a campaign in 2002 to clean up such mistranslations and Chen, a retired language professor at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, is at the vanguard of the "English police" enlisted by city officials to correct these bewildering items.
Hotlines have also been set up for citizens who spot an English-language-related mistake on a public sign to call and notify the authorities.
According to Liu Yang, head of the Beijing Speaks Foreign Languages Program, they have worked out 6,530 pieces of "standard" English translations to substitute the Chinglish ones on signs around the city.
"Our goal is to make Beijing free of Chinglish signs by the end of this year," Liu said.
Still, one area is very challenging to address - menus.
Chen said that deciding how to translate Chinese dishes like "Pock-marked Grandma's Tofu," a spicy pork-and-tofu dish named after its creator, is extremely tricky.
"We finally set a principle - translation of the names for dishes should be based on one of four categories: ingredients, cooking method, taste, or the name of a person or place," he said.
While some of the many foreigners living in Beijing welcome the drive, some others regret losing a source of amusement.
"Correcting them is really taking away one of the joys of China," Oliver Lutz Radtke, a German free-lancer who once lived in Shanghai, wrote in his blog (www.chingligh.de) which is dedicated to photographs of "Chinglish" signs.
But Chen doesn't share this sense of loss.
"We don't want anyone laughing at us," he said. "Moreover, our work is aimed to help foreigners. After all, Chinese people don't need English-language signs."
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