Shanghai Street View: Chinglish Cleanup
Many expats in Shanghai will be pleased to hear about a new campaign to standardize the local use of English and other foreign languages to make the city friendlier to foreigners. Such a drive is long overdue, even though it may come as a minor disappointment to lovers of “Chinglish”, the Sinofied version of sometimes comical and often unintelligible English one often finds at many shops, restaurants and other public venues.
The problem of confusing and often mangled English in many places owes to several factors, most notably a lack of access to native speakers for many venues that want to provide English menus, literature and other materials for foreign visitors. Still, it’s important for big cities like Shanghai to gradually clean up these problematic translations, which often have a small-town laughable quality that detracts from the city’s quest for international recognition.
In a somewhat ironic twist, Shanghai seems to have largely excluded foreign participation in the creation process for its new regulation, titled “Rules Governing the Use of Foreign Languages in Public Venues”. After reading about the effort in the local Chinese media, I went to the city’s main Chinese-language website and found a place for the public to provide input on the draft rules. But there was no mention of the plan at all on the city’s English website, meaning most foreigners probably had little or no way to make suggestions on this important new initiative.
In all fairness, I have to say that most English translations in official Shanghai venues are usually reasonably correct, drawing on the city’s vast resources and easy access to the more than 150,000 expatriates who live here. But the city’s many shops, restaurants and other privately owned venues often lack similar access, with the result that they often end up creating flawed English menus on their own or perhaps with the help of other non-native speakers.
Nearly every foreigner in China has his or her own stories about their favorite Chinglish signs, and I’m certainly no exception. A visiting Singaporean friend and I began laughing uncontrollably once while dining at a local restaurant whose English menu had comically translated all of the dishes directly from their poetic Chinese names. Our laughter was so loud that an embarrassed waiter finally came over and took away our menus to stop us.
The menu at a Sichuan restaurant chain where I often dine has an especially entertaining item on the menu, titled “porn pie”. Of course the word “porn” should really be “pork”, but only someone who can read the original Chinese would realize that. Another of my favorites is a sign I once spotted at a local milk tea shop. That one contained the puzzling and somewhat feudal line “My drinking controlled by my serf,” when again the intended word should have been “self”.
The list goes on and on, including a long and entertaining list of various Chinglish signs and accompanying photos emailed to me recently by one of my foreign friends living in Hong Kong.
Some might say that China should be praised for its hospitality and efforts to make the country more accessible to foreigners, and I quite agree with this view. After all, it’s not very common to find Chinese signs in the US or Europe, even though such signs are usually grammatically correct when they do occur.
I don’t know what the new Shanghai regulation will contain when it’s finalized, as there was no actual copy of the draft version that I could find on the website. But I would suggest that the city not only take steps to regularize its own procedures for translating signs, but that it also provide similar resources to its many private businesses so that they can do the same.
An effective way to proceed would be setting up an online resource where anyone looking for translations could find native speakers willing to provide such services for a fee. After all, many private shops and restaurants simply don’t get good translations because they don’t have access to native speakers and try to do the job on their own.
The city would also have to promote the service to make sure everyone knows about it. That kind of coordinated effort could help Shanghai to become a model city for the rest of China to follow in the slow but necessary clean up of Chinglish. While some resident foreigners may mourn the loss of this entertaining Sinofied language, many more will be pleased and relieved to find signs and other materials that achieve their intended aim of being informative rather than confusing and comical.
