Language Log

Some random specimens…

This is one of the thorniest, orneriest Chinglish puzzles I've ever been confronted with.

Confused by this category of toilet brush. Can @LanguageLog illuminate what’s happened here? pic.twitter.com/lHaqM3OD3q

— Henry Hitchings (@henryhitchings) October 26, 2022

Hit the Engrish mother lode.  What an incredibly bountiful harvest!

We've ignored this (ig)noble variety of English for too long.  There are scores and scores (nay, hundreds) of wonderful examples on the Facebook group Engrish in Japan, which you may explore to your heart's content.  Since some of the posts cycle through multiple items (e.g., in the comments sections), they seem almost endless (I read them for hours).  For this post, I will focus primarily on a recent item, which is about onsen 温泉 ("hot springs" [and bathing facilities]) etiquette, but will also mention many others.

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From Yuanfei Wang in Hong Kong:

From Francis Miller:

With apologies for the glare from the plastic covering, this sign comes from the canteen at Lingnan University in Hong Kong:

Tim Frost found this sign last (southern hemisphere) summer at a lakeside in Argentina, near San Martin de los Andes.

Yet more fun (see parts 1, 2, and 3).

Don't JuYiGe

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Still more fun (see parts 1 and 2 on Chinglish examples from WeChat).

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[This is a guest post by Greg Pringle, in response to questions I posed regarding the photograph at the top of this post from yesterday, mainly: 


What does the Mongolian script say?  Does it match the Chinese*?  Are there any mistakes in it?

*The Chinese is short for "in color with Doppler ultrasound".]

The Mongolian says önggöt – het dolgion – zurag (ᠥᠩᠭᠡᠲᠦ ᠬᠡᠲᠦ ᠳᠣᠯᠭᠢᠶᠠᠨ ᠵᠢᠷᠤᠭ). It literally means "coloured ultra-wave picture" or, as Google Translate has it, "colour ultrasound imaging”. My Inner Mongolian dictionaries confirm that önggöt het dolgion zurag means literally “彩色超声波图” in Chinese and it is found on the Internet with that meaning.

You quote Diana Shuheng Zhang as saying the Chinese means "Color Doppler Ultrasound". I did find önggöt doppler zuraglal (Өнгөт Допплер зураглал) "coloured Doppler sketch” in Mongolian-language pages on the Russian Internet, and Jichang Lulu found a couple of sources from Mongolia.

Rather than continue confirming what you already know, I think it fair to bring up the issue of terminology.

More fun with Chinglish examples from WeChat (see part 1 here).

Yantai

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Fantastic collection of Chinglish examples from WeChat.

There are 18 examples all together.  I've already done 2 or 3 of them (see under "Selected readings" below), and a couple of them are not so great.  That leaves around a dozen that are previously unknown and quite hilarious.  I'll do them in two or three batches.

1.

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