Re: Chinglish

From a friend:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/world/asia/03chinglish.html?src=me&ref...
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/05/03/world/asia/20100503_CHINGLIS...

A couple favorites from my own experience:

A Chinese pastry restaurant in Boston's Chinatown offers a "Pu Pu
Platter" in its menu. (I'm guessing "pu pu" means "common", so it
might be an assortment of common pastries.)

I once stayed in a truly tiny hotel room in Tokyo, and read the list
of things that were prohibited in the room. One of them was "Objects
beyond imagination in weight or volume." This raised some strange
questions in my mind. For example, how large would something have to
be to be "beyond imagination in weight or volume" for the author? And
is it necessary to prohibit such things from such a small room?

Funny.

I see bad English all the time here, even beyond my own emails: on packaging, in t-shirts, etc.

I even heard the story of a store offered a 50% reduction on shirts, as advertised in an English sign... which unfortunately forgot the R in 'shirt'.

T-shirts with printed English (or French, which is a distant second) are very common. One of my students sometimes wears a t-shirt with this image printed on it:
http://www.cinemaretro.com/uploads/badbush.jpg
He's 15 but so far he still doesn't get the play on word!

I often fantasize to take a video camera and randomly interview young people in the street, quizzing them of what the words on their t-shirt say. Most wouldn't know.

But then the reverse is true, too. I know I have said funny things in my broken Chinese. There is also this story about a foreigner asking the lady in a small restaurant: "How much do the dumplings cost?" ("shui-jiao, yi wan, duoshao qian") but because he used the wrong tones and the wrong unit, he actually asked: "How much to spend the night [with you]?").

Also, westerners would sometimes wear oriental clothes with Chinese characters on them without knowing any more what they say. Another story: a western lady wears a nice kimono with Chinese delicately written on her chest. One day, she was wearing this dress when she met some Japanese business people. The Japanese men started laughing. The text read something like: "drink the good milk flowing from here".

Sometimes, in the recesses of my own mind, I make play on words that I would be the only one in the world to find funny, because they involve a mix of English, Chinese and French... So I keep them for myself and laugh alone, letting other people wonder what is wrong with me! ;)