China International Travel Blog
Foreign Devilry*: A Chinese-Speaking American's Blog
by Brantley Collins, Co-Director of CIT
Older posts can be found in our blog archive: 2009
English in China
March 1, 2010
Any Westerner who has much experience traveling in China has seen firsthand the problems created by attempts to translate Chinese into English. In defense of the non-native English speakers charged with this potentially embarrassing task, English is, of course, in so many ways a vastly different language from Chinese. Still, it’s hard not to chuckle at some of the crude, inappropriate, and unintentionally hilarious results of their attempts: a phenomenon known as "Engrish." In my travels I’ve come across many instances of Engrish, which I’ve begun to document, especially as the quality of public English translations in China improves and Engrish begins to disappear.
Public signage is probably the main source of Engrish:
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"May joy be with you |
"Caution, slip!" |
"Safety exports" |
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"Ganzhi Blind a Health Chamber" |
Rock out with "Uncle Rock"! |
There’s actually an interesting story behind "Uncle Rock."
I also enjoyed some of the English names of formations in the Jiuxiang Caves near Kunming that we came across on our trip to Yunnan last November:
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The world-famous |
...and "Posture in Lying of an Old |
In some cases in which you would have to nitpick to find fault with grammar and usage, such as this sign in the Stone Forest area, English translations can still have unintended connotations. In that social context, a place where many ethnic minorities (non-Han Chinese) reside, the use of the word "civilized" has an uncomfortable authoritarian undertone for some Westerners that is completely missing from the Chinese version, which is an innocuous call for everyone to keep the area clean:
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"The Stone Forest, our home, |
Another common source of Engrish is literal translations of the names of dishes whose historical and cultural background are unknown outside China. The menu photos below are from a restaurant in Lijiang and a dumpling restaurant in Shanghai (for the record, the food at both of these places was absolutely delicious):
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"Pure tribute crab |
The ever-popular dish |
You gotta love how the attributive "Yunnan" becomes the subject of the sentence "Yunnan slightly fries the meat" (perhaps better rendered as "Yunnan-style pan-fried meat"), and a similar mistake results in "The millet fries the salty duck egg spicily." If I didn’t eat a mostly vegetarian diet, I would have loved to get crazy with the "Wild fung chicken soup." Give credit to the owners of the restaurant for finding all of the more-appropriate standard translations they could for the other dishes, however.
Then there are the completely strange or unexpected instances of English you encounter randomly, such as this appropriately-named store and the mystifying brand name on the package below that I came across in an upscale hotel bathroom (note the hilarious cartoon image holding an apple):
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"P.I.M.P": The latest in hip-hop fashions |
"Donless"? |
Even as Westerners enjoy a few laughs at the expense of these hapless translators, we shouldn’t be too smug. Most young people in China are diligently studying English, and in the future there will be a much larger number of Chinese whose English is not just good, but in many ways better than most Americans’. And as China’s presence in the world continues to grow, no doubt many non-native speakers of Chinese will be faced with the opposite task, resulting in laughably crude and inappropriate Chinese translations—a phenomenon that might be dubbed 憃文. (If you can read Chinese, I think you’ll get the joke; if you can't, well, that’s what it’s like to be on the other side.) No doubt I’ve been an unwitting perpetrator myself on many occasions, but fortunately my Chinese friends have usually been too nice to give me too hard a time about it.
Chinese New Year Fireworks
February 17, 2010
To celebrate Chinese New Year in China, especially with family, is a fun and fascinating experience: the festive atmosphere, both at home and out on the town; the excessive consumption of food and alcohol; and, perhaps most exciting of all, the fireworks. In 2003 I spent Chinese New Year in Shanghai, and the amount of gunpowder detonated in that city in the 16-day period from New Year’s Eve through the Lantern Festival (on the 15th day of the lunar year) absolutely blew my mind (no pun intended). As a childhood pyromaniac who hadn’t indulged in fireworks in many years, I was on fire with excitement (again, no pun intended)—though to anyone with normal sensibilities, it was like being in a war zone, with so many fireworks going off at certain times that you could barely have a conversation outdoors. My father-in-law and I burned (no pun intended, of course) a completely unjustifiable amount of cash on long strings of firecrackers, big batteries of rockets, and various other explosives. I strolled through the city streets, tossing firecrackers to and fro and setting them off in every nook and cranny to magnify the sound of the explosions. Obnoxious, mildly destructive, and environmentally irresponsible, to be sure...but also ridiculously fun. If not for my distaste for puns, I would be tempted to say that I literally had a blast. I’m just fortunate to have emerged from the experience with all ten fingers and all five senses intact.
In celebration of the new year, I present some spectacular photos that will give you some idea of what the experience of celebrating Chinese New Year in China is like. We at CIT are anticipating another successful year, and we’d like to wish all of our family, friends, and customers a fierce Year of the Tiger. Thank you for your support!
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Fireworks make the city look |
It's amazing the city is |
Outside viewing on high-rise |
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Fireworks stores pop up |
Let's hope they're well- |
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Mile-long strings of firecrackers |
...and people, too, if they |
Firecracker aftermath |
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Ironic beauty in all that |
Especially in picturesque places, |
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...and Hong Kong's Victoria Harbour |
The city both figuratively |
Raft trip at Longhu Shan (“Dragon-Tiger Mountain”)
January 22, 2010
In 2004 my wife and I took a trip to Jiangxi, an inland province that, while no doubt changing rapidly, is still lagging behind the coastal regions in terms of development. (Personally, I think a little less comfort and a little more local flavor makes a trip more interesting, but that’s for another post.) While there, we visited Mount Lu and a truly poor rural village, among other places, but one experience that also sticks out in my memory is the raft trip we took at Longhu Shan.
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(video by CIT) |
One great thing about China is that you can truly get away from it all there, especially in inland rural areas like Jiangxi. This raft trip was a profoundly relaxing experience. Check out the trained cormorants catching fish for the fisherman on one of the rafts! (On our Yunnan Highlands Local Culture 11-Day Tour, you might see cormorant fishermen in action on Lake Er at Dali.)
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(video by CIT) |
Waaaaaarm beer! Peanuts! Get yer warm beer and peanuts! A bamboo raft trip at Longhu Shan: just like a baseball game, but without that loud obnoxious drunk shouting and crowding your space, and without the threat of a foul ball bashing your head in unexpectedly, and...ok, it's nothing like a baseball game; it's much better, though that beer could have used a little refrigeration. And that raft vendor could use a little more charismatic sales patter. (Our tours that include Guilin feature a raft trip like this one; those that include Kunming, Dali, the Three Gorges, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Zhouzhuang, and/or Suzhou all feature gondola or boat trips that you may find even more relaxing or stimulating.)
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(video by CIT) |
During the last part of the trip, we walked overland as the bamboo rafts were portaged past an impassable section of the river. It was a good opportunity to get some footage of the beautiful farmland in the area, record the deafening sound of the obnoxious local cicadas, check out an ancient Taoist temple (where an immortality pill was created by a Taoist master, who's unfortunately no longer around to tell us how he did it), and take a rickshaw ride. At one point during the walk, a local man started to talk with me, and you can hear him saying that I look like an American before the conversation is cut off. (The identification of "Caucasian" with "American" is very common in China, and comments like that always make me want to launch into a lecture about why such assumptions are wrong - but maybe he just meant that my flagrantly casual clothing and wide-eyed, foolish manner were unmistakably American, in which case I can't argue with him.) After the raft trip resumed, we watched a flashy "cliff acrobat" rappel down the side of the mountain as a prelude to a "hanging coffin" show; the area was once home to a minority (non-Han) culture that placed its coffins in grottoes in the cliff face. Unfortunately, either my battery or my tape ran out at that point, so I was unable to record what followed. (If you’re interested in these “hanging coffins,” our tours that include the Three Gorges feature a boat trip that will allow you to see similar ones.)
Progress in China
January 13, 2010
“Progress” is a word that carries all kinds of philosophical and historical baggage. However, progress of some sort is undoubtedly being made in China, and foreign visitors are invariably impressed by the speed and scope of the changes there. On our most recent trip to China in November, we saw all of the usual and obvious signs of this progress—new buildings under construction, massive public works projects, infrastructural developments, people earning and spending money everywhere, technology being integrated more and more into everyday life. But there was one small fact in particular that seemed incredibly significant to me: even while we were in a remote, rural mountain area, we were able to get perfect cell phone reception deep down in a cavern and also in a mountain tunnel. Wow. Having a crystal-clear conversation with people on the other side of the planet as you walk among stalactites and stalagmites definitely makes an impression.
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Progress: A "touchmedia" screen |
Progress? Now you can |
Local beer, properly bottled, |
As an American who values what our political system gives us, I certainly wouldn’t want to exchange our system for China’s. But these days China has an unquestionable ability to Get Things Done. What China has been able to accomplish in the last 25 years is truly remarkable, and other countries can certainly learn from China’s successes. A couple of months ago, Time published an insightful article about this issue called "5 Things We Can Learn from China." It's definitely worth a look, and in fact there are links on that page to a number of articles that should interest anyone wanting to understand contemporary China. Happy reading!
* "Foreign devil" is a loose translation of the traditional, now only mildly pejorative Chinese term for foreigners, Westerners in particular.
Older posts can be found in our blog archive: 2009
