Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Chinglish - Definitely Interesting Translations

Chinglish. You hear a lot about it from time to time here. It made a lot of news a couple of months ago, when Beijing started making a big effort to clean up bad Chinglish around the city in anticipation of the Olympics.

So what is Chinglish? Well, Wikipedia says Chinglish is a portmanteau of the words Chinese and Englishand refers to either (a) English interspersed with English language errors common to those Chinese persons who are learning English or (b) Chinese interspersed with English, such as used by westernized Chinese (e.g. American-born Chinese) who are not fluent in Chinese and codeswitch English words into speech when they can't think of the correct Chinese word.

The examples can be rather hysterical and / or embarrassing at times. That is why Beijing has made such an effort to cleanup and improve the bad examples around the city. They hope to get corrected prior to the Olympics in 2008.

Often you can tell that someone has tried to use a computer dictionary to translate Chinese to English. The results can be rather bad.

I just came upon an interesting photo in another blog of a great example of Chinglish. Click here to see for yourself.

Let’s hope the English we translate to Chinese isn’t creating as many embarrassing mistakes.

Labels: ,

posted by A Bryson (formerly) in China @ 6:39 PM Comments: 0