It's Chinglish Time!

Posted 4:39pm Thu Sep 10th, 2009 by Ellis Pugh
  • 1752 reads

I love Chinglish. A lot.

In fact i'm not too proud to admit that much of my valuable revision time last year was spent on sites like www.engrish.com, giggling immaturely at accidently funny Chinese and Japanese-English translations. Which is why this current list of 'top ten' embarassing chinglish amuses me greatly, and I thought was well worth sharing:

1) Good good study, day day up (好好学习，天天向上)
Note: Study hard and make progress everyday

2) How are you? How old are you？(怎么是你？怎么老是你？)
Note: Why are you here? Why do I always meet you?

3) You have seed. I will give you some color to see see. (你有种，我要给你点颜色瞧瞧。)
Note: You dare to bully me! I’ll get you back

4) You ask me, me ask who? (你问我，我问谁？)
Note: You ask me the reason, I don’t know either.

5) We two who and who? (咱俩谁跟谁？)
Note: We are intimate friends.

6) No three no four (不三不四)
Note: indecent

7) Horse horse tiger tiger (马马虎虎)
Note: Just so so.

8) One car come, one car go, two car pengpeng, one car died! (关于一场车祸的描述)
Note: (It’s a description of a traffic accident) Two cars collide, one of them was ruined.

9) People mountain people sea (人山人海)
Note: So many people

10) If you want money, I have no; if you want life, I have one! (要钱没有，要命一条)
Note: I have no money, what I own is only one life.

So thank you People's China Daily. My favourite here has to be the car one, and no10 has an amusing Nina Simone-ness to it. But still by far my favourite piece of Chinglish didn't even make the list: It was on a sports centre in Andingmen a couple of years back and it had a list of activities on it, one of which was 'Yoga Pirates'. Yaaaarrrrrrrr

Have any of you seen any decent Chinglish recently? If so, do come and share it.

p.s on a more serious side, there are interesting debates surrounding Chinglish. Here is an example of one such debate.

Re: It's Chinglish Time!

JodieKane
At 6:13pm Tue Feb 1st, 2011 JodieKane said:

This one sounds like a nursery rhyme:

"One car come, one car go, two car pengpeng, one car died!"

But my favourite example of Chinglish by far is:

"Tender, fragrant grass. How hard-hearted to trample".

It's just absolutely beautiful. I'm not Chinese and I don't speak a word of the language, so I don't know precisely how it came about but I'm hoping that it's just the way it would be conveyed in Chinese. If that's the case, it works just as well in English. So much better than "Keep off the grass".

Of course, you can't have that kind of thing cropping up in contracts or medical logs or the like, but you'd hope a professional translation agency was being used for that kind of thing anyway. Wherever it's harmless though, I think Chinglish should be left alone. This whole war being waged on it just seems like a massive overreaction to me. Eradicating it in all forms just isn't necessary, in my opinion.