Chinglish

Oh it's a cheap laugh but often a good one.

First off, a disclaimer - I am imminently grateful for any attempt the Chinese people make to translate their pictorial language into something resembling a familiar alphabet with which I may decipher what it is they are selling/instructing/guiding/etc. Especially if it keeps me out of trouble with any type of Chinese authority, or prevents me from ordering dog/tripe/pig snout/etc. And I am particularly grateful that the default secondary language is English. Hats off, China, you have Russia beaten by miles in that regard!

But the translations are often so funny that my deep-seated appreciation for the English attempt is overcome by my occasionally immature sense of humour. Sadly, in the first week our giggles were stifled by Beijing's 'Olympification' in which many of the Chinglish signs were cleaned up (farewell, Doctor of Anus, hello Proctology Clinic). Still there are menus translated into English that have so many misspellings one can spend perhaps too long laughing over the choice between jeep-fried noodles and pord shaslirs. And my favourite sign thus far, as seen at a hostel bathroom in Pingyao, presenting the option of 'squats the bedpan' or 'sits the bedpan' (sits please!). You've got to appreciate the efforts of the local cafe, though, cheap laughs aside, for making it just a little bit easier and quicker for us tourists to get our sautéed eggplant and spicy chicken with peanut sauce.

In official signs, often the translations are correct from a spelling/grammar point of view (more or less) but are so direct from the Chinese original that it ends up making no sense whatsoever, or is so garbled that you get bored halfway through. Thank you, Terracotta Warriors Museum in Xi'an for this example:

The hard time during the last twenty years went by, a few generations' great efforts are tremendously rewarded. The Emperor Qin's Terra-cotta Army Museum is well known in the world now. The past has gone, we are going to shoulder the heavy responsibilities in the future. In the new century, the museum men are ready to meet the new challenges. We are going to strictly implement Protection of Historical Relics of Laws of the People's Republic of China. The laws clarify the working policy of historical relics: rely mainly on protection, rescue is the first, making rational use and strengthening management. According to this policy we'll work harder to establish the Institute of Emperor Qin's Mausoleum and try to make greater contributions to human culture relics undertakings in Shaanxi Province and in China.

So the museum is filled with signs like this filled with grand self-important declarations of duty and conscience but nothing about, say, why the Terracotta Warriors existed or the historical context of the Emperor Qin's existence (nah, go to Lonely Planet, or Wikipedia if it's not censored, for that). Nearly every tourist site of importance, particularly in Beijing, has an obligatory tribute to the benevolent PRC which, since 1949, has worked hard, investing considerable time and resources into the protection of historical relics of the Chinese people (oh, except for that little period between the late 1950s and 1970s in which it was government policy to encourage the physical destruction of anything predating 1949).

Little less mission statement, little more info please!

But it all starts to make sense when you pick up a Chinese-authored English textbook...

In Ping'An, outside of Guilin in Guangxi Province, Heather & I were eating at a cafe where the waiter spoke fairly decent English. Ping'An is in the middle of nowhere, more or less, a rural village whose claim to fame includes the Dragon's Backbone rice terraces and being the 'Frist Village of the Long Hairs' (due to the local women never cutting their hair). So, again, the fact that there was any English was appreciated.

Anyway, the waiter was named Liu Sheng, or Peter as his English teacher christened him, and was very keen to practice his English with us. He was a 2nd year university student striving to be at the top of his class in English so that he could study abroad in the US. I asked if he was studying for the TOEFL (test of English as a foreign language), which is the required standardised test for any international student whose first language is not English. After much confusion and description of the test we established that it was a Chinese-devised exam for which he was studying.

Chinese English teaching logical fallacy #1...if your objective is to score English competency levels, let's not study for the exam that actual native English speakers have determined will grade such competency. Instead let's focus on a Chinese text book determination of what English is.

So we get a look at his study materials, which were causing him considerable stress and worry. The first section focussed on 40 or 50 vocabulary terms such as

• so

• therefore

• as a consequence

• for example

• as a result of

• hence

• frankly

I thought it a bit strange that the terms were randomly dispersed and not grouped in such a way that might assist a student in realising that 'hence' and 'consequently' were effectively two ways to 1) say the same thing and 2) relate one concept to another. We went to great lengths to explain this to Peter ("They are ways to relate two concepts. I went for a walk, hence I'm tired. is different from I went for a walk. I'm tired. because you could be tired for a reason other than your walk." Blank look.)

We may have confused him considerably, though he did attempt to apply the term frankly after we described it as being direct or straightforward ("so I could say, Frankly, you are both beautiful." Er, yeah.).

No doubt, however, the textbook's illustration of the correct usage of 'for example' was far more illuminating for dear Peter:

For example, Chairman Mao was a great leader.

(snort, chuckle)

But by this point we thought Peter's written/reading English must be quite good if he's learning this kind of vocabulary, and that maybe his spoken English was just needing a bit of practice. Then we got to the second section, which was just page after page of cliches - hundreds of them.

• A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush

• Rome wasn't built in a day

• Call a spade a spade*

• Many hands make light work

• All roads lead to Rome

• etc etc

*Or, as my former colleague once said to me, "Sarah I like you. You're the type of person who doesn't just call a spade a spade, you call a spade a f**king shovel." Too true...but I chose not to teach Peter that one.

Anyway this poor boy was stressed out of his gourd about his future in English study trying to just memorise page after page of these 'so he could go to university in the US and understand what the professors were saying'.

It's a bit difficult to undermine the authority of a Chinese teacher to their student, so we did the best we could to describe what these meant, all the while looking at each other wondering why in the hell this would be essential to English comprehension. Part way through though, Peter says "can I ask you a question? What do they mean when they say Coca-cola 'Light'?"We replied it was a marketing term, to describe that it was low in calories or sugar. He nodded a little bit, then pointed to a lightbulb and said "but why 'light'?" It then became clear that Peter had no idea about the difference in English between light as a description of weight, relative to heavy, and light as a description of colour or energy, relative to dark.

Chinese English teaching logical fallacy #2...why teach the basics when you can require students to memorise useless cliches that they would be able to deduce or inquire as to the meaning of were they faced with one at some point in the future and actually had reasonably fluent spoken English skills.

Some of these sayings Heather & I had never heard of (and between us we span 3 continents and thus variations of native English)! And poor Peter thought that memorising these phrases was his ticket to success in an American university.

I am reminded of my Chinese-born high school English teacher Mr Tsang who had a similar approach to teaching Hamlet. So long as we memorised the appropriate passages and could recite the vocabulary definitions, it didn't matter whatsoever if we knew what irony being the 'contrast between appearance and reality' actually meant or could identify the use of it in Shakespeare.

I think it's illustrative of an aspect of the Chinese psyche that is so conditioned to obedience, policy and procedure that

• memorisation is more important than comprehension (Chinese English textbooks) or application (Mr Tsang's AP English class); and

• glorification of duty and government is considered more important than actual information or context (Terracotta Warriors Museum sign).