Language Log

The Chinese electronic commerce company called AliExpress offers for sale this unusual product:

Magic grass of queerness diy desktop mini plant bonsai mosquito radiation-resistant qu wencao

Because I know Chinese and am used to reading Chinglish, I could figure out this product name on the first go, but to provide an adequate exegesis for Language Log readers, I shall endeavor to recreate the Chinese upon which it is based, then retranslate it into more immediately intelligible and idiomatic English.

Francis Miller sent in this photograph of a lollapalooza of a Chinglish banner (click to embiggen):

For the last couple of weeks we've been focusing on loans from Chinese and Japanese into English and from English into Chinese and Japanese. In this post, I'd like to demonstrate the intricate intertwining of Mandarin, topolectal Chinese, Japanese, and English, with Japanese providing for Chinese two key terms from comic book culture. All of these things are illustrated in the following promotional item that Nuno Sobral stumbled upon in the QQ music app:

Cheng Fangyi sent in the following photograph of a sign in China:

From a friend who is travelling in Japan:

Sign at the Paris Baguette shop in Zhongguancun, Beijing:

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?":