Language Log

At the top of hundreds of webpages belonging to the Shenzhen Energy Corporation, a large power company in Guangdong Province, China, we find the following four main headings:

shǒuyè 首页 ("Home")

xīnwén zhōngxīn 新闻中心 ("News center")

tóuzīzhě guānxì 投资者关系 ("Indicrteurseus")

qǐyè wénhuà 企业文化 ("Culture")

From Gabe Wyner come photos of a menu in Arcos de la Frontera, whose English version is full of the delightful consequences of someone's earnest reliance on a bilingual dictionary. For example:

The Tea Leaf Nation online magazine posted this article on May 19, 2013:  "VP Biden’s Penn Commencement Speech Inspires Viral Rant by ‘Disappointed’ Chinese Student."  The article, by Xiaoying Zhou, offers an excellent account of this tempest in a teapot (as it were), and the comments that follow it are also germane.

Still, a closer look at what the angry student, Zhang Tianpu, actually wrote will help us put the controversy in a clearer perspective.

Liwei Jiao sent in a selection of signs from a Chinese website that was originally part of a collection assembled in the Daily Mail. We've seen most of these Chinglish signs before, and have already discussed several of them over the years. But this one is new, at least to me, and unusually inept:

This marvelous device is the pride of Hang Fung Industrial Co. Ltd of Shantou / Swatow, Guangdong Province, PRC.  Here's a basic introduction to the tool:

Useful assistant tool Can helps some arthritis, the waist, the knee, the pregnant woman and also The luo river to solve the question. Multifunctional tool Multifunction tool for the accident situation security, reliable for the Escapes from the broken glass window and the safety belt cut off.

This information is provided under "Product Details" at this website.

Looking at the picture of this enigmatic tool and carefully reading over the explanation of its supposed uses only left me deeply perplexed, so I had no choice but to go in pursuit of yet one more Chinglish snark.

David W. Donnell has brought this signage from Chinatown, NYC to my attention:

"From Forsythe Street." (VHM: that should be "Forsyth Street.")

David Craig sent in this photograph and asked "What does it really say and why doesn't it?":

Joe Abley is in Beijing this week attending the 46th ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) meeting, and this sign appears in the window of one of the polished, expensive-looking boutiques within the Beijing International Hotel:

Meena Vathyam sent in this photograph from Shanghaiist:

The following article appeared in the April 7, 2013 issue of the Times of Israel:  "When Hitler and Schindler are the same character:  A Chinese translation of Irene Eber’s Holocaust memoir ‘The Choice’ exposes unique cross-cultural linguistic quandaries".  As soon as I saw the main title, I thought that something was a bit gefilteish.  After reading the subtitle, I knew for sure there was a problem.

Hiroshi Kumamoto (a specialist in Middle Iranian, especially Khotanese) sent in the following photograph of the sign on a water boiler in the Department of Linguistics at Tokyo University:

Daniel Tse spotted this sign in Seoul recently:

Nathan Vedal wrote to tell me about an interesting mistranslation into Chinese that he recently came across.

Having purchased some not particularly healthy, but quite delicious, instant noodles produced by a Korean company, he was perusing the Chinese instructions, which included the following sentence: