Have you had your Engrish today?

[muckefuck]

A couple of you asked if I brought back any egregious examples of Engrish from my travels. As we say in the vernacular: BOY HOWDY! English was ubiquitous in China--we saw it on street signs, menus, monuments, advertisements, museum displays, tickets, t-shirts, and even the asphalt. And where there is English in Asia, there is inevitably Engrish.

In general, we found more of it the farther we strayed from Beijing. Some of this (such as the elimination of the celebrated "Racist Park" sign) is no doubt due to Olympics preparation, but I'm sure it has as much to do with the drop off in foreign language skills as you leave the metropolis behind. Our worst tourist guide in terms of intelligibility was in the little (in Chinese terms, this means a population of less than 1,000,000) river town of Fengdu. It was also there that I netted this pearl of incompletely digested translation:

It was said if you can put u-
pstone to downstone in made of togethe-
r. It can recover heart sick.

(Punctuation as in the original; Chinese equivalent: 又传将上下两半衲合，可医治心病.)

Actually, the entire description of the 星辰礅 (sorry, can't remember the "English" name) in the "Ghost City" of Fengdu was like that, but this was all I could scrawl down in the time I had. (It was more than just his bad English that made him the worst guide we dealt with.)

Even venerable Xi'an was far enough from Beijing's Foreign Studies University to present us with some real gems, chief among them "No Lion-Pressing Drive". This was on the road to Xi'an Xianying International Airport; unfortunately, we went by too fast for me to grab the characters, but our surmise is that it has something to do with staying in your own lion, er, lane. At the airport itself, we were presented with a choice of "Recycling" (可回收) or "Unrecycling" (不可回收) on all the trashbins. And if we were hungry, we had in addition to the usual options that of "Restemdessert". (Still haven't figured out this one; the equivalent Chinese was 西点, which looks to me like an abbreviation of 西式点心 "Western style snacks", 点心 diǎnxīn being the etymological equivalent of our own "dim sum". How you get from that to "Restemdessert" is an exercise best left for the student.)

Of course, the real treasure troves were the menus, so I'll think I'll save those beauties for another entry.

Comments

[that-dang-otter.livejournal.com]

Did you actually go to the "racist park"? I went there during my 2001 trip and found it to be a rather surreal experience. Rather amazing ethno-historic propaganda about treasured Chinese ethnic minorities, such as the Tibetians, the Koreans, and the Taiwanese.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Sadly, not enough time. It was on the complete other side of town from us; a cab to there at 9 a.m. on a weekday took more than forty minutes. (We passed right by it on our way to the airport our last day.) We had to get our disturbing ethno-historical propaganda through other channels (such as our guides, who almost all seemed to be cribbing from the same Party-approved guidebook).

[keyne.livejournal.com]

It was said if you can put u-
pstone to downstone in made of togethe-
r. It can recover heart sick.

WTF was that intended to mean?

And what's the story behind "Racist Park"?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

The full name is 中华民族园 or "Chinese Nationalities Park" (officially translated as "Chinese Ethnic Culture Park"). On road signs, this gets abbreviated to 民族园 "Nationality Park". Someone must've been looking for a similarly pithy English equivalent, but how they came up with "Racist" rather than, say, "Ethnic" I can't imagine. (The usual Chinese word for "race" in this sense is 种族, which shares the same second element as 民族, but is quite distinct phonetically.)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Oh, and as for the stone: "It was said that if one can reunite the top and bottom stone, it can heal a broken heart." [A free rendering of the Chinese text.]

[mistress-elaine.livejournal.com]

God yes, Chinese menus. Oodles of fun. I think I had my biggest menu-related laugh in India, though, where one particular restaurant had "fried children" on the menu.

As for the "restemdessert", that's really not too complicated. Dianxin doesn't just mean "dim sum"; it also means "dessert". The slip from "Western dessert" to "restemdessert" can probably be explained by bad handwriting and a printer who wasn't too familiar with the English language or its alphabet.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks. Now that you mention it, I can see the resemblance between "western" and "restem".

BTW, I don't think of 点心 of being "dim sum" at all, which is why I called it an etymological equivalent. AFAIK, this usage is unique to American English; even in Australia, this style of brunch is called yum cha (i.e. 飲茶), which is the actual Cantonese term for it. In Korean, where the characters 點心 are read 점심 /cemsim/, the term refers to lunch. (No idea what it means in Japanese.)

On the same note, is 小吃 xiǎochī simply the most common Standard Chinese term for "snack" or is it specific to certain varieties? I don't remember ever coming across it in my class in the States, but of course my teacher speaks Taiwanese Mandarin.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

"Sautefillet with bleak pepper" (Optionally accompanied by spring robls.)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Never saw any bleak pepper, but I did once turn red to black by a slip of the tongue. (This was on Asiana Air, however, so the language was Korean.)

[joliecanard.livejournal.com]

I found some awesome Engrish (do you get to call it that for all SLs?) in Albania. On a bottle of water, the Albanian side said:

I mbushur siç
del nga burimi i pyllit
te Tepelenes

The English side said:

Suffled how it gush
from the source of the woods
of Tepelena

You think they'd have done a better translation, considering it was "The water of the Albanian national football team."