Why Chinglish Exists

 

In mid August, while researching articles to tweet as a daily part of my job, I read an article announcing that “Shanghai says days of 'Chinglish' are numbered”. The official definition of Chinglish is a variety of spoken or written English that is influenced by the Chinese language.

 

In 2009, Shanghai began the crackdown on the embarrassing, often inappropriate and nonsensical text which appears on signs, on menus and the like. The campaign to eradicate "Chinglish" was also launched in the run-up to Shanghai's 2010 World Expo. Students were sent out to “clean up” the translations. While Shanghai’s translations are better than before, 15% percent of the translations are still terrible.

 

Every morning, while working on my social media management portion of my job, I always comb the Internet for horribly bad Chinese into English translations and wonder how these quirky translations make it onto public signs. Why aren’t they edited by a native English speaker? Simple to do, right? 

My guess is that use of a translation company or localization vendor just isn’t cost-effective for a small business and since the Chinese read the Chinese characters and understand them and most likely do not read the English, it is not important to the business owners to get the English perfect.

Translation vanity may also come into play. Having worked in the localization industry for over 16 years, I often see that translators are not very happy with changed translation. Granted, a lot of changes are preferential and just a different way of saying the same thing with a different choice of words. Perhaps, these translations have been questioned for years but were left as is because the translator “says it is correct”? Perhaps, the feeling of “we can translate it and we don’t need foreigners to assist us” exists? Saving face could be another possibility.

Chinglish may also exist due to the use of online, free, machine translation. If you need to find out the gist of an article or an email that a foreign friend has sent you, it is OK to use machine translation but if you are going to use the translation on an official sign, a menu and the like, it’s a very bad idea.

Some of the translations are also overly “flowery” almost “poetic” English. There are just a few Chinese characters and many, many English words. 

After spending the past year studying Mandarin myself, I do see just how structurally, tonally and dramatically different Chinese is from English, so this can also add to the lack of proper translations. Both are exceedingly difficult languages to master. Both languages are highly idiomatic. When I read a paragraph in Chinese aloud to my instructor, she always me to now translate into English, Chinese-style. This means literally translate, as so: “I not go to teacher’s house 9PM dinner”. Literal translations from Chinese have given us English phrases, such as “long time no see” and “no can do.”

While I am very glad that China is cleaning up their English translations, I will say I will miss them. Reading them is the happiest part of my mornings! And I am sure the Chinese get quite a chuckle out of our bad Chinese tattoos.