Asia is famous, at least on the internet, for garbled translations of English (or should I say the Orient is famous since nobody knows about Kyrgyzstan). T-shirts and street signs mash up text that is ostensibly English, but grammar, word order, and especially coherency are completely off. The result of Chinese people using English in conversation and signage- Chinglish- is often bizarrely meaningless or outrageously vulgar.
Aunt Fong is here. Where are you?
I did see a fair share of pathway markers with Chinglish cautions in Chinese tourist sports. Next to a scenic stream, visitors were warned “Water depth! don’t near.” In a wooded area a sign minded onlookers “Experienced vicissitudes. No ravages undergone,” which I tried to follow, but failed. I got stuck halfway experiencing things when I realized I didn’t know what a vicissitude was.
These signs were good for a chuckle, as were the t-shirts I saw on young people that had everything from random words strung together, to letters mashed from a keyboard, to outright curse words that made my jaw drop. The kids wearing these clothes had no idea what they said; they only liked the “cool” style of English words. I was there to witness one college student’s embarrassment when my Foreign Affairs Officer at the university where I taught, Amy Hu, told the girl that the English text on her shirt was a description of breast feeding. Sometimes the naïve students’ t-shirts left me mortified, other times I just laughed, but I couldn’t really fault them since I come from a nation of gullible tattoo freaks who willingly and illiterately ink awkward Chinese characters onto their skin.
More common than the phenomenon of Chinglish text, sometimes more interesting but often only frustrating, were the spoken English sentences made by Chinese who were trying to transliterate typical Chinese phrases using English words.
Here are the most common Chinese-to-English phrases I heard during my stay:
“No, thank you.” (Instead of “You’re welcome.”)
In Chinese, it is standard to reply to thanks by saying bie keqi (sounds like “bee-yeh kutch”), which means roughly “Don’t be polite,” or bu yong xie (boo yowng shee-ay): “No need to thank me,” equivalent to “You’re welcome.” So a polite Chinese person, after hearing me say “Thank you,” was tripped up by the similarity of the Chinese phrases and would tell me “No, thank you,” sometimes being corrected by a classmate: “It’s ‘You’re welcome!’”
Pronounced, by Chinese speakers unused to that tricky th- sound, as “Sank you.”
“He/She” Confusion
In China, the men are men and the women are women, but you could never trust who was which if you heard them spoken of by another person. For example, someone might begin talking about his mother, but then he would make a switch and say, “He lived in the south as a girl.” If the contradiction were ever as glaring as that, I would give my friend an obvious hint. “He lived?” They would pick up on my playful disbelief right away: “I mean she!” But I learned to be skeptical and expect conflation between “he” and “she.” In Chinese, “he” and “she” are pronounced the same (“ta” for both) and written not all that differently. It amazed me that these simple pronouns could be a stumbling stone for so many errors. That is, until I noticed myself switching pronouns when I tried to rush out a sentence in their language.
“My brother/My sister”
These terms weren’t confused with each other; they were often substituted for “my cousin” or “my friend.” I heard quite a few young people mention their brother or sister and I started to become suspicious. “Don’t you all have a One-Child Policy?”
Many of the young people I met in my semi-rural province did have siblings because- I assumed- they were out of the government’s iron grip, probably because they lived in the country where enforcement was lax and it was an open secret that there were ways around the One-Child Policy. Some had parents who must have been wealthy enough to pay the fines and exorbitant extra costs of raising and educating a second child.
Once, I asked a young lady why she called her cousin her “brother.” She told me there wasn’t a good word for “cousin” in Chinese. Moreover, she grew up as an only child and so did her cousin, and because they were frequently around each other at every family gathering, they felt close like siblings and naturally called each other “brother” and “sister.”
One thing to note: having China’s One-Child Policy in mind will confuse you if you ever meet the people in China. There were many single-child households, sure, but there were also many young people with a (real) brother or sister. I would ask them, “What about the One-Child Policy? Are your parents in trouble with the government? Is your little brother a secret?” I never got a satisfactory response to my question. It was either a flat yes or no, or a “Yes, but we do” or “No, we can.” They had a hard time explaining it. Actually, none elected to give me a worthy explanation. Probably not unlike explaining the allowances granted by Freedom of Speech laws to a man from a state-controlled culture, or American gun laws and the Right to Bear Arms to a novice foreign visitor.
China’s version of the Fountain of Youth, the Immortal Bed.
“I very like it.”
Grammatically, the sentence could be “I really like it,” or “I like it very much,” or even “I very much like it.” This is a fine distinction, easily unknown or forgotten by my congenial Chinese friends. It is easy to understand how someone learning English would say “I very like it” after they learned that “very” is an intensifying adverb to turn a word like “good” into the superlative “very good.”
“I know.”
I was not so charitable toward this phrase. No, I almost lost my temper and made a classroom outburst the first time I heard a middle school student say, “We know.” It was when I went to the chalkboard to make a distinction about two similar phrases. Maybe I was explaining the difference between replying, “I’m sorry?” and “Say again” to the Chinese students who thought that the latter was the preferred way to ask someone to repeat themselves. I don’t remember for sure. But as I was writing and explaining myself, a student said, “We know.” I immediately snapped over my shoulder and eyed the students to try and identify who said it. It sounded like an openly condescending remark, made by a student rolling their eyes at the redundant teacher. Being very green and lacking confidence in my authority as a foreign teacher, I held my peace and went on with the lesson. I wanted to scold them, “You know? Then why did you make the mistake?! Don’t stop me when I’m teaching you, you little smart alecks!”
When I saw this sign, I thought there had better be wild monkeys.
I heard “I know” or “We know” replies a few other times, in class and in conversation, and it started to make me suspicious. It was spoken with a flat tone at times, not with a sarcastic edge, and it was spoken politely in friendly conversation with a smiling student. Something was amiss. Finally, after learning enough Chinese to become familiar with everyday phrases, I learned that a common response used to indicate understanding is, literally translated, “I know.” In English, if someone tells me news and I tell them, “I know,” of course it usually means “I already knew that.” In Chinese, “I know” (“Wo zhidao”, said “Wuh jih-dao”) means the English equivalent of “I see.” Or, the difference between telling someone you understand them and telling them they’re behind the curve because you understood that already.
The sign delivered as promised.
“Read. Follow me.”
It was either this or “Look. Follow me.” Or “Watch me.” Chinese is a language of simple commands, having no use for spare words to make a sentence flow or sound more polite. Chinese speakers, steeped in this straightforward grammar structure, naturally adapted it to English sentences.
The robotic commands I heard in China sounded very abrupt to my ears, conditioned to catch the subtle differences in tone between English words. A Chinese speaker with beginning or intermediate English skills might use Tarzan talk or baby talk, but I always gave them credit. I knew what they meant and I knew they had put forth a lot of effort to learn to speak English. Also, I knew firsthand how difficult and time-consuming it was to acquire a foreign language, and English was such a foreign language compared to Chinese.
Besides, once the students of English had worked with the language for a few years and been exposed to enough American movies, they started to phrase things naturally.
Sound advice.
“Good, good study. Day, day up.”
This is a literal translation, I understood, from a motto of Chairman Mao. The very first time I heard someone use this cheer, the group of Chinese friends I was with laughed at the “Chinglish,” but I understood it perfectly, immediately. It seemed like a clever way to use English; the simplicity streamlined the words’ meaning. I heard this phrase fairly often, usually as a rallying cry after group exercise or spoken by students in discussions on difficult homework assignments.
Perhaps this is the finest example for English speakers, using the building blocks of our own language, of how Chinese works. Super simple, with no inflection or function words in between the main thoughts.
This one almost makes sense.
“Have a good sleep.”
Whenever I went out to lunch with someone (usually students I met in the cafeteria) they would bid me farewell by wishing me a good sleep. Naptime was assumed, a part of the culture built into work and school schedules. So it was expected that after our lunch was over, I would go back to my apartment and sleep. My friends were only being polite. This phrase is fine grammatically; it stood out to me only because I have never heard an American wish me a good nap and in China I heard it every time I went off to my after lunch rest.
“Wish you happy every day.”
My friendly well-wishers would also end conversations, text messages, greeting cards, and online chats with “Wish you happy every day.” I’ve never heard an American say this, either, and I doubt it was part of the Chinese English language textbooks. I had to assume that people were transliterating a standard Chinese phrase.
“I’m fine, thank you.”
Speaking of English textbooks, in China (and all over eastern Asia) the students are taught to respond to the basic greeting, “Hello. How are you?” with “I’m fine, thank you.” It sounds as wooden and forced as you might imagine an uncomfortable Chinese student would sound when reciting strange, foreign sounds.
My fellow foreign English teacher, Grant (the Australian), and I would always tell students on the campus, “You don’t have to say, ‘I’m fine, thank you.’ You can say, ‘I’m good. How are you?’ or anything you want.” Grant would add a “mate” in there. It would have been a sweet dream for me to see a Chinese student referring to his friends as “blokes” or “mates.”
“What a pity.”
The other stock phrase that was over-used to perplexing effect was “What a pity.” I heard this one tossed out hundreds of times over every mild disappointment. In America, the standard reaction I’ve heard to bad news is “That’s too bad” or “I’m sorry (to hear that).” Among my peers, I’m sorry to report, the popular reply is “That sucks.” My generation is no longer aware that this phrase is vulgar, and the Chinese were unaware that “What a pity” is thought quaint by contemporary Americans.
It sounds, I don’t know, British? There is something overly refined about “What a pity” that strikes Americans as something that might be spoken by a Gibson girl or white-gloved old matron. Americans are far too proud of their middle class-ness and informality to casually say, “What a pity.”
In my mind, I thought of the James Bond arch-villain, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and his more famous parody, Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers’ movies.
By the time I saw the sign, somebody or bodies hadn’t obeyed the sign, since the smiling flower was gone and not saying hello to anybody.
One time, I missed a Chinese lesson with my very strict teacher, Uncle Jiang. Aunt Fong had taken me out on an errand and told me it would be all right to postpone the lesson, but soon her husband called her up and chattered some harsh vibrations over the cell phone. Then, Aunt Fong handed the phone to me, stupefied. My first phone conversation in China with someone whose English skills were quite limited. What was I supposed to say?
“Hello?” I said.
“What a pity…” Uncle Jiang slowly growled. His voice was low; angry emotion seethed inside but he restrained it, I imagined, through clenched teeth and flared nostrils.
It was the first time I had heard “What a pity” in this kind of a context. I didn’t pick up on his meaning, and I tried to relay the explanation that Aunt Fong had told me in the clearest bullet points. “I’m with Aunt Fong. We are near your home. She is taking me to dinner. We will eat dinner.”
Uncle Jiang wasn’t interested in listening. “What a pity…” he breathily said again. I was confused at first, then taken aback. I could feel his rage through the phone. He went on and lectured me that when we agree to a meeting time, we have to commit to it. This happened during week 2 or 3 of our Chinese-English study, and up till that point I thought we intended to work hard but had mutually agreed to meet together as friends. Uncle Jiang didn’t take a casual interpretation.
“Okay… Okay… Okay,” I replied to him. It was my first brush with Chinese temper tantrums. While in China, I would witness a few other occasions where a man would become moody as a little boy and expect everyone to cater to him. This behavior was contemptible when I saw it in husbands or young adults, but it was worst in government officials and media spokesmen. I figured that Confucian social structure and the pampering of male children resulted in self-centered men who abused the attention they were entitled. Let me qualify this statement though: I saw Chinese men in private life on limited occasions. Mostly, in public, I saw standard behavior that I would expect from men anywhere, but with Chinese characteristics: joviality, conviviality, excitability, boisterousness, slovenliness, loudness. I am not saying that temper tantrums were typical, only that there were more than a couple conspicuous instances where I was shocked to see a man acting babyish, and disgusted to see the people around him having to accommodate him. Of course, American men lose their tempers too, just not with the same pouting I saw in China.
In the media, Chinese government spokesmen act contemptuous and high-handed when dismissing U.S. claims of computer hacking, for example, and they are outright bullies when denying claims in South China Seas territorial disputes with their Asian neighbors. When I see it, I have to soothe my indignation by humorously imagining them delicately stroking a white cat and haughtily saying, “What a pity.”
This blog, like this “world” in China, is non-smoking.
“What are you doing?” “Where are you going?”
Moving on to a lighter topic, “What are you doing?” was a typical Chinese greeting. Another traditional greeting was “Have you eaten?” I was told that this became common in China’s impoverished past, when people were many and food was scarce. Asking your neighbor if he had eaten showed your concern and indicated you were willing to feed him if he were hungry.
In the same way, friends and acquaintances meant to show concern and polite interest by asking me “Where are you going?” whenever I left my campus apartment. It could feel very direct and intrusive, as if I were being interrogated over suspicious activity. After righting my balance, I was able to rattle off a casual answer. In a way, I had to admit that it was a better information-gathering question than “How are you?” If someone replies, “Good,” then what is there to work with? In my experience the reply to that reply is “That’s good” and the dialogue is over. But if someone tells you what they are up to, then that might be enough to open a small conversational door. At least it’s better than the dead-end of “How are you?” “I’m good.” “That’s good.”
For once the English is perfectly proper. A good minder, too.
“Eat medicine”
This one was minor, but instead of pairing “medicine” with the verb “take,” the Chinese transliterated their own verb-noun pairing and said, in English, “eat medicine.”
I mention this because “eat medicine” sounded odd to my ear (you don’t eat medicine- that would involve chewing- you swallow it or drink it), and because it serves as a representative example of the many minor discrepancies in language and conceptual thinking between Chinese and English. (These minor phrasal discrepancies can be found in any language compared with another.)
Think about this one: why do we say “take medicine” but the Chinese say “eat medicine”? It is essentially describing the same thing, but the words “take” and “eat” have different usages and associations. In one language, “eat” can mean the intake of something like medicine, in the other it involves food and insults, but not medicine, and chewing and swallowing.
“Where are you come from?”
This phrase was the main offender while I was in China. Other Chinglish transliterations or mistranslations could be funny, confusing, awkward, charming, strange, nonsensical, off-putting, or just plain incorrect, but “Where are you come from?” annoyed me harshly and persistently.
Whenever a curious stranger approached me and asked me this question, my spine shivered, my hair rose on the back of my neck, and my jaw stiffened. Its sound was as pleasant to me as the screeches of an engine run without oil.
Most times, when speaking with a Chinese friend, student, or new acquaintance, I was very gracious with them and appreciative that they were trying to speak English with me. It took courage. So I had patience and I tried to build them up, only seldom correcting a language error when they were having difficulty. With “Where are you come from?” though, I insisted on slipping in “It’s ‘Where do you come from?’” in the snippy tone of a grammar pedant. I could not let it pass. It I could have, I would have rounded up all the attempted English speakers in China and conducted a one-hour class to drill “Where do you come from?” until no one could forget it.
You may ask what was so bad about this grammar error in particular. Well, I would have to answer its prevalence- sprouting up everywhere like an invasive weed- and more so its ugliness. It takes the brain along one path: “Where are you…” and then startles it with the jarring contradiction “…come from.” Plus, it was often blurted out with a glib smile, as if an enemy were insulting my injury with a grin.
Signs aren’t always worth much to native speakers anyways. I saw a few of them carving their names into the Great Wall with car keys.
There were other common confusions I tried to clarify when I could, when necessary. The most prevalent item was the difference between “What’s the matter?” and “What’s the matter with you?” a significant tonal distinction in English but a similar meaning if the words are analyzed by a Chinese student. In these cases I was calm and I picked my battles- an English class I would correct, but a casual acquaintance I would not. I knew my place.
Any grammar ire was reserved for “Where are you come from?” which I immediately corrected before giving them my answer. Perhaps I gave them the impression that most Americans are difficult and sharp. Maybe I should have told them “I am come from France.”
Translates fine, but I thought it was funny that this amusement park was called “China Dinosaurs Park” and not just “Dinosaurs’ Park.”
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