CHINA / National |
Writing the wrongs of Chinglish(Shanghai Daily)Updated: 2007-01-29 13:48 Welcome to China, where the slippery are very crafty, you must receive strangers carefully and the polices warmly warn people not to drive tiredly. Confused? Amused? Beijing teacher Liu Yongli is simply embarrassed. He has spent the last three years photographing 1,000 or so examples of poor, misleading or just plain mysterious English used on signs in Beijing and a few other cities. "English is widely studied in China, but it is remote from daily life," said Liu, who teaches English at a Beijing university. "A lot of the common English, and that used on signs, does not appear in textbooks." He has collected examples of Chinglish signs that range from poor grammar or spelling - "Please cleaning" and "Volu nteer" - to the bizarre. A favorite of his reads: "To take notice of safe, the slippery are very crafty." It is actually warning people to take care when using a sloping driveway up to a building. And another: "On the taxi the guest stands forward." Liu suggests the simpler "Taxi pickup point" would probably do. One Beijing school even stuck up signs demanding students "Speaking English Only!" "I think this is a problem of lack of culture, of illiteracy," Liu told Reuters. "Signs are supposed to provide convenience. But these ones not only are inconvenient, they cause trouble too." Liu first noticed how bad Beijing's Chinglish problem was in 2003 when studying for his master's degree. Then he got a camera a year later and started snapping away. Today, he says, he never leaves home without it. "The government does not pay enough attention to this problem," he said. Beijing has set up a body specifically to tackle the problem ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games, but Liu said a national standard was needed. "The government should publish a standard book that people and departments who make signs can refer to," he said. "There's another laughable problem: China has a national language commission, but it's only concerned with Chinese and not English," he said. Liu has attracted considerable local media attention for his campaign and likes taking reporters to see a large car dealership where the word "exit" has been written "export" throughout. |
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