October 03, 2007

The finance is enclosedchief: Fire exting wisher box

Victor Mair has sent in a few more examples, collected on his most recent trip to China, of "the proliferating Chinglish that leaves us all breathless".

Here is the banner line of a full-page advertisement for a new office building in a glossy in-flight magazine:

THE FINANCE IS ENCLOSEDCHIEF (sic)

This mystifying English sentence is mirrored by the following Mandarin phrase:

金融
圈
首席
JIN1RONG2
QUAN1
SHOU3XI2
finance
circle
seat of honor;
head of the table
"The seat of honor in the financial district"

Next come several warning signs:

In a stairwell at Lishi Hotel (Beiing):

Have a care!

I had no idea what to take care of until I read the accompanying Mandarin:

XIAO3XIN1 PENG4TOU2

Be careful not to hit your head.

In the hallway of the hotel where I stayed in Ürümchi:

In contrast, in the Foreign Languages Bookstore in Beijing, we have:

FIREEXTINGUISHERCASE (no camera with me that day)

This photograph, courtesy of Paula Roberts, was taken in Lhasa:

The mistranslation is due to an overly literal rendering of the first two characters of the Chinese sentence, after which the translator (or the sign painter) apparently just gave up:

YOU3 GOU3, QING3 WU4 KAO4JIN4!
there is / has dog, please do not get near

I like the contrast between "have a care" and "have a dog"!

Victor also sent a photo to illustrate the growing role of doubtful English as a fashion accessory in China:

A similar impulse is behind the many strange uses of Chinese and Japanese characters documented by Tian at Hanzi Smatter. The most recent example is an analysis of the katakana subtitles on Kanye West's video for Stronger.

Victor is off to China for a conference on the Origins of Writing at Peking University, and promises to collect more examples along the way.

Posted by Mark Liberman at October 3, 2007 06:37 AM