Silver Collars and No Talls in Disorder: Changing Chinglish

The 'Great Taipei Shoes Store' may not know it yet, but I've just renamed it the 'Dataibei Shoe Store.' I also think foreigners in Changzhou, the Chinese city where I live, will find 'No Unaccompanied Children' much clearer than 'Taking Care of Teenager.'

'Chinglish,' the bizarre but often entertaining mixture of Chinese and English that's ubiquitous in T-shirts, storefronts and street signs here, was recently targeted for elimination by the Chinese government. It was Beijing's latest attempt to modernize China by making it as bland as possible.

This order somehow filtered through the serpentine levels of the Chinese bureaucracy to the translation department of the Jiangsu Teacher's University of Technology, a school that produces mostly middle-school and high-school teachers. I teach English and history there, which makes me, in Chinglish, a 'foreign expert,' a phrase that itself needs a new translation. I'm not really an expert in much of anything besides being foreign.

The translation department compiled a number of pictures of suspect signs from all over this city of three million, about 100 miles west of Shanghai, and took its best crack at fixing the more egregious errors. At some point, the translators decided they needed help from the foreign experts to complete the national directive.

So I and another foreigner teacher were invited to consult. I think the translation department figured we would simply give their work some finishing touches, but we realized we needed to start from scratch.

A number of their translations were better than the indecipherable original, but they still were mostly literal translations, even when they made no sense in English.

'Chinese Characteristic Mall' might have been an improvement over 'Chinese Characteristic Commerce Street,' but it still took me a while to understand that the translators were trying to say 'Traditional

Chinese Mall.' That name was ironic anyway - the mall is so Western that if you removed the Chinese characters decorating some stores, you could plop it down in Albuquerque and no one would think it was out

of place.

A few of the signs were also so misspelled that I needed to ask the meaning of each individual character in the Chinese word. That way, I figured out that 'No Talls in Disorder' should be translated as 'No Street Vendors.'

The work was a lot harder than I thought it would be. For every 'Fire Channel' I could quickly rename 'Fire Exit' there were puzzles and cultural references that were hard to decipher. For instance, the

Chinese like to brag in their signs. While there's nothing wrong with saying that the third floor of a mall has 'Famous International Brands of Women's Clothing,' I figured 'Women's Clothing' was sufficient

for a floor sign.

The hardest task, though, was translating a paper written to promote Changzhou's businesses. The gallery of translation teachers sitting behind us insisted that we keep 'top national brands' and 'famous

Chinese brands' in separate lists, even though we thought that no English speaker would understand the difference between the two. We lost that fight.

The other foreign expert and I also had to convince our Chinese colleagues not to make up their own words in English. We had to explain that 'silver-collar' didn't really mean a worker who was more senior than 'white collar.' We won that one.

The Chinese translation teachers wanted us to give reasons for every change we suggested. We may have been less diplomatic than we could have been. They weren't happy with us for calling some of their translations 'completely senseless.'

One of the translation teachers told me later that they planned to submit the recommendations to the local government, which was charged with fixing the signs and papers. Many of our suggestions made it into the report, especially our explanations for why changes should be made. The signs will stay the same for now, but I imagine that one day, without warning, 1,000 workers will suddenly appear - they never do

anything small in China - and the signs will be replaced in an instant.

It was a big kick to get to name things I've seen. I've been to the 'Confidant Boathouse,' and I can't wait to go back and see it as the 'Friendship Boathouse.' But I'm afraid we're losing a little of the fun of living in China. The country will lose a little of its uniqueness when signs like 'Taking Care of Teenager' disappear, and the locals start worrying instead about unattended children.