Shanghai Winning War on Chinglish
Glad they’re winning the fight in Shanghai but second and third tier cities are full of egregious violations.
China’s most international city says it is winning a war on “Chinglish,” the garbled and often quirky translations that adorn street signs, shop fronts and menus across the country. Officials from Shanghai’s “quality watchdog” announced that the accuracy of English language signs in public spaces had improved 85 per cent since it took action three years ago.
The campaign to eradicate “Chinglish” was launched in the run-up to Shanghai’s 2010 World Expo and aimed to spare the city’s blushes from thou-sands of giggling foreign guests. Shanghai’s “Commission for the Management of Language Use” deployed hundreds of volunteer students on to the streets.
Signs removed include those telling commuters to “keep valuables snugly” or to “inform police immediately – if you are stolen.” Visitors venturing out-side China’s big cities can still dine out on “gross noodles,” withdraw money from “cash recycling machines” or relax in “personnel crush-rooms.”
Shen Weimin, vice-director of Shanghai’s municipal bureau of quality and technical supervision, boasted that English gaffes were increasingly rare and that other provincial governments were following Shanghai’s lead. “We created standards in the use of English for 12 industries from public transportation to tourism,” he said, according to the Global Times newspaper.
– Daily Telegraph