Unrecycling

Botched English translations are one of my top five favorite things about China. Having a working knowledge of the language only makes them funnier. Here's a great one I had heard about, but finally saw in person today:

To be fair, public signage is probably one of the toughest things to translate. Chinese has a whole sub-vocabulary of highly formal, concatenated expressions for exactly these kinds of applications, so it's not surprising that there are so many mishaps. But this one's not even that bad. Other highlights so far include:

• A girl with a hot pink windbreaker that has "TONICHT" printed in black across the shoulders.
• A two-year-old boy with a t-shirt that says, "Violators will be shot. Survivors."
• And a waiter with a t-shirt that reads, "Car park permit holders only. Eccess charce SSO," which I can only imagine is a serious misreading of "$50."

Then there are these really simple shirts -- which I think could be really popular in the US, by the way -- that just have a bunch of random English words printed on the front, left-justified. I wrote about my favorite one, "Passion Because South Africa People Style," last time I was here, but I must have seen eight or nine different ones just this week that I keep forgetting to write down.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not claiming I could do any better in Mandarin, and I'm sure Chinese people have just as much fun with our t-shirts that to them just say, "bravery" or "enlightenment," but a solid Chinglish line is always good for a laugh, and really quite comforting when you start to feel like the language is impossible to learn.

再见

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