Oct. 29th, 2007 10:51 am
Have you had your Engrish today?
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muckefuckA 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:
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.
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-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.)
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.)
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.
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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.