A note from the Palace Museum

Chinglish on the way

This column aims to identify Chinglish in public areas. If you see any Chinglish signs, please send a picture of it to lizhixin@ynet.com together with your name and address.

By Terry Boyd-Zhang

In truth, the only thing really wrong with the English version of this sign, in my opinion, is the placement of the comma. It should read: Because the important activity is gone on a sightseeing tour by you, bring about forgiving inconveniently, please. I guess it is still a bit Chinglishy. I will explain.

You know how it is, whenever there is something important, such as giving directions to some hopelessly lost tourist, the person you need to solve the problem (i.e. the Chinese guy who actually knows the directions) has wandered off somewhere, often to do something which you bloody asked him to do in the first place.

It is usually something incredibly unimportant, like buy iced tea or whatever else you could have managed on your own but just didn’t have the gumption to bother. Some days in China are like that.

So it turns out that you have to forgive: the tourist (for not having a Lonely Planet), the guy (for being too wonderful) and yourself (because Bad China Days are totally normal). Believe me, forgiving is extremely inconvenient because you would rather just stay mad.

My editor is screaming behind me, “Talk about the sign!” Well, okay. The sign in Chinese is perfectly clear: Because (yin) there is an important (zhongyao) activity (huodong) – Gary Locke is visiting the Palace – this has given (gei) your (polite form, (nin) (de)) visit (canguan), your sightseeing (youlan) has been given (dailai) some inconvenience (bubian) – dear common, everyday tourist – please (very polite, (jingqing) forgive (yuanliang) us.

At this point, I would suggest a break, such as a calming bowl of zhajiangmian (noodles with fried bean sauce) at a restaurant outside the Drum Tower. Send your guy out for iced tea, pull out your Insider’s Guide and forgive Gary for being a more important tourist than you are. It’s inconvenient but, hey, some days are just like that.

Difficult to find the police

Chinglish on the way

This column aims to identify Chinglish in public areas. If you see any Chinglish signs, please send a picture of it to lizhixin@ynet.com together with your name and address.

By Terry-Boyd Zhang

In my hometown, we find the police at the doughnut shop – this isn’t the beginning of an old joke you’ve heard before. There used to be two police vehicles. We would breeze through town, count cars – one at the stoplight, one at Tim Horton’s – then cruise off into the darkness, anticipating all sorts of wild and crazy things that teenagers with cars do. Surprisingly, most of us lived to tell about it.

In China, it is not very difficult to find the police. Beijing, for one, is a safe city, with police busily monitoring traffic and public safety on almost every corner. Sure, bad stuff still happens – a car accident here, a fire or a murder there – but it is promptly and efficiently dealt with. You would hardly know the thing even happened.

If you do have (you, the first character in the problematic line) trouble or difficulty (kunnan, the second and third characters) finding (zhao, the first character after the space) the police (jingcha, the last two characters) in Beijing, you could always try another city, such as Chengdu, Dalian, Guangzhou, Shanghai or Wenzhou. You could also try a more remote place, such as Guizhou, Tibet or Xinjiang. If you still have difficulty finding the police, I would think you are not trying hard enough. However, you should be able to find some soldiers, a special task force, a security guard or, at least, a grandma with a red arm band.

If, after all of your adventures around this great country, you truly still find it troublesome to find the police, I would suggest you fly to London. I hear they may have some police there but, unless your difficulty is extremely urgent, I believe they are currently busy with other matters.

Careful clothes flower lipstick

Chinglish on the way

This column aims to identify Chinglish in public areas. If you see any Chinglish signs, please send a picture of it to lizhixin@ynet.com together with your name and address.

By Terry-Boyd Zhang

This translation seems to have been an amateur one that does not really say what it needs to say. I thought it was Google Translate, but it isn’t. If it was, it would be: “Please take care of you clothes get lipstick.” Huh?

Luckily for us, the characters are all fairly basic. The first character is qing (please), which we have seen before. Just a reminder that most Chinese characters are made up of two parts; the part on the right of “please” lends the character its pronunciation, but in itself actually means green or blue, like clear water in a Canadian mountain lake.

The second character is xiao (small) and the third is xin (heart). These together, xiaoxin, mean “careful.” You can say this before (or after) the friend you are walking with trips and falls into an uncovered manhole. The next two characters are yifu and mean “clothes.” So far not bad.

Here’s where it gets tricky. The next character is nong and means many things, such as “to use improperly.” However, I think in this case, it should simply be “make, get.” Flowers is the next character, hua. See the “grass” radical at the top, which is often found in characters relating to plants. Except hua can also mean “pattern” or, in this case, a “print, spot” – we will see why in a minute.

The fourth from last character is the polite form of “you” (nin, “you” at the top and “heart” at the bottom), and added with the next character (de), turns into a possessive – “your.” Finally, the last two characters are kou (“mouth”) and hong (“red”), which together mean “lipstick.”

In other words, ladies (and gents), when you try on clothes, be careful not to smear your lipstick on them.

Police breeze and hurl a telephone

Chinglish on the way

This column aims to identify Chinglish in public areas. If you see any Chinglish signs, please send a picture of it to lizhixin@ynet.com together with your name and address.

By Terry-Boyd Zhang

Dude! (As my Australian friend likes to say) What has happened here?!

Wow. Well, the characters are not terribly difficult to read. Let’s start with the first character at the top and work our way through.

The first character is gui (expensive) and the second character is yang (sun). Wait a minute: so far, the translation is correct! Let’s go on. The third character is cheng (multiply) and jing (police). The last two characters are zhi (pay … out) and dui (brigade, team). All right!

Moving on to the bottom line of the sign, we have the character jing (police) again, just like above, and then lu (road) in brackets. Then there is feng (breeze, wind).

Wow! This is a truly accurate translation! I am impressed by the use of articles “the” and “a” and prepositions “by” and “to” on the sign. However, if the words are “right,” why doesn’t the thing make any sense?

The problem comes in putting it together. The first two characters together, Guiyang, is the name of the capital city of beautiful Guizhou Province. Then, chengjing means “traffic police” and zhidui means something like “division,” meaning a group of the Guiyang Police Department responsible for traffic violations. Preventing them, I mean –  not causing them.

Now, jing (police) and lufeng probably mean “police service” and the following two characters are jiandu (supervise). Lastly is dianhua (telephone).

Therefore, this sign must be for the Guiyang Traffic Police Supervision Hotline. If you ever need this number, and I hope you never will, you can be fairly sure that the phone number is as accurate as the translation. If it isn’t, you can always breeze the streets, hurl telephones and wait until the police find you. This is not recommended!

Politely refuse visiting

Chinglish on the way

This column aims to identify Chinglish in public areas. If you see any Chinglish signs, please send a picture of it to lizhixin@ynet.com together with your name and address.

By Terry-Boyd Zhang

If you have small children in your house, this is a sign you might want on the bathroom door to remind yourself of patience and understanding for little ones. If you do not have small children, I will relate to you a fairly typical scenario.

Mother goes into the WC with new trashy magazine just in from the Old Country in hand. She locks the door, sits and starts to get comfortable, ready for business.

“Mom!”

Deep breath and politely refuse visiting. “Go away.” Literally, according to the sign: Thank you (xie, the first character). The refusal (jue). The visit (canguan also means ‘“tour” or “look around”).

“MOM!”

Politely, please don’t disturb. “I’m in the bathroom!” Patience dwindling. “What?!” Back to the sign: Please (qing). Do not (wu, also can mean “none” or “no”). Bother (darao, in other words “interrupt”).

The problem with the English on this sign is that the first half makes it sound like it should be hung on the inside of the door, not the outside. It sounds more like a reminder to the host to be hospitable, instead of a message to the visitor meaning, frankly, “Get lost” or, less politely, “Piss off.”

The sign should say something like: Thank you for your visit but you may not come in to have a look around and please don’t disturb us, because there would be no point anyway.

Because I took this photo in Mao’er Hutong, just off Nanluogu Xiang, I can tell you firsthand that Wanrong’s former residence is not behind this door. If you find Wuhao (a curated boutique and arts space), you will see that they have done a wonderful job of restoring her garden. In one of the rooms you can see a huge mirror that was given to Wanrong by emperor Puyi, her future husband.

Rather than being to the right of the garden, the home of the Emperor’s second wife is to the left of her garden, absolutely gorgeous in its disrepair. However, now that you know that, please be polite in your visiting and don’t disturb the ghosts that live there.

Nihil Obstat – Entiende Usted?

Chinglish on the way

This column aims to identify Chinglish in public areas. If you see any Chinglish signs, please send a picture of it to lizhixin@ynet.com together with your name and address.

By Terry-Boyd Zhang

“You get what you pay for” is a common saying in English.

The other day I saw a sign on a bus for a travel company that promised “Scenery and Beauty for Cheap.” I thought to myself, now that sums up modern society’s problem in a nutshell, doesn’t it? We all want luxurious scenery, green as the virgin Canadian forests in a nature documentary, total natural beauty. Pristine. Untouched by disrespectful tourists who want it for nothing.

We all want perfection, but most of us can’t afford it.

So, if you hire a cheap translator, you are likely to get what you pay for.

On the other hand, maybe the translator for this sign was too expensive and fluent in too many languages to know which one to choose. Is it German? Nein, my German friend told me, it’s more like Latin, or Latin-English, so this will have to be a double explanation.

According to Wikipedia, “nihil obstat” is Latin and means “nothing hinders” or “nothing stands in the way” of an initiative or an appointment. An example might be a totalitarian government’s decision to ban or censor a particular book or movie. Incidentally, “nihil” is related to the English word “nihilism,” a movement which encourages the end of traditional social values and beliefs, along the lines of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Now for the Chinese. The first character in Chinese is wu. We have seen it before and it means “no” or “none.” “Obstat,” of course, is represented by the characters zhang’ai, which means “obstacle” or “hinder.” The last two characters are tongdao and may mean “channel” but can also mean “route,” “passageway” or “thoroughfare,” and means “tunnel” when it is a dixia tongdao. I do not know why it is plural.

So, the Chinese is fine, the Latin is good, and the English…well, you can’t win ’em all. I took this photo outside the excellent Tianchumiaoxiang Vegetarian Restaurant in Wudaokou, which did appear to be wheelchair accessible — at least the ramp was bicycle-free the day I was there.

“Scared” Land of Yan’an

Chinglish on the way

This column aims to identify Chinglish in public areas. If you see any Chinglish signs, please send a picture of it to lizhixin@ynet.com together with your name and address.

By Terry-Boyd Zhang

I suspect that most foreigners in China, even the most ignorant of Chinese history, must be vaguely familiar with Mao Zedong.

Basically, various communist groups were on the move, from the south of China to the north, and then west. Why were the communists marching, you ask? Well, the motherland found herself oppressed on all sides. From without, there came the bad guys: imperialistic Japan, Germany and Britain, among others. From within, China was under the yoke of ignorance, illiteracy, backwardness and progress-stalling old ideas of the ancient Qing Dynasty.

The march that became known as the Long March started in 1934, took longer than a year and covered about 12,500 kilometers across the hinterlands of China. I would be scared of walking that far. They ended in the province of Shaanxi, not far from Yan’an. These are the last two characters on the sign. This city became the Communist Party base from 1936 to 1948. The March represents Mao’s rise to power and Yan’an represents the birthplace of the Revolution (geming, the first two characters), which won over the country on October 1, 1949.

The problem with the translation is the central two characters which say shendi or “Holy Place.” If Chairman Mao was a god, translating shendi as “sacred” would be fine. However, if Grandpa Mao (as my children were taught by a local person to say) was a man, then using “holy ground” is incorrect — and scared place demonstrates a slip of the translator’s pen, so to speak.

Welcome you to Yan’an, the birthplace of New China.

Do Civilized BJ Men

Chinglish on the way

This column aims to identify Chinglish in public areas. If you see any Chinglish signs, please send a picture of it to lizhixin@ynet.com together with your name and address.

By Terry Boyd-Zhang

Wow. Well, there isn’t too much more to say about this, is there?

This Big Sister looks like your average just-over-the-hill middle ager, but you never really know someone, do you? I bet she could surprise you with stories of a wild Beijing which you did not even know existed. (Or maybe you did?!) Young ladies, pay attention! You mother may know more about Beijing men than you do.

That’s a scary thought, isn’t it?

In fact, this sign, or something like it, is very common around Beijing: at bus stops, tourist sites and parks. It seems China has become a bit obsessed about becoming “civilized.”

I don’t get it. I understand that hosting the Olympics and the World Expo are huge historical honors for this great country with more than five thousand years of glorious civilization, but what does “civilized” truly mean in 2011? If it means getting rid of my Shanghainese “leisurewear” (sometimes called “pyjamas”), then forget it. I’ll take my leisurewear over “civilized,” thank you very much.

The first character in the photo is unclear, but it’s probably zuo (do, make). The next two characters are wenming, pretty basic ones that mean “civilized” — whatever that means. For example, Beijingers are good about offering a bus seat to those in need, whereas Shanghainese are not. With one-and-a-half hour commutes each way every day, can you really blame them? Apparently “civilized” does not mean “no spitting,” a disgusting and dirty habit and that I personally cannot get used to.

The next two characters are youli, which means to “have manners” (limao means “manners”). If your child is polite, the grandmas will praise them in this way.

The next character is de, which is a particle of speech, in this case meaning something like “belonging to,” and the last three characters are Beijing ren (“person”).

So, Big Sister’s apron should say: “Become a Civilized and Well-Mannered Beijinger.”

Construction for the Inconvenience Here, Please Forgive Us

Chinglish on the way

This column aims to identify Chinglish in public areas. If you see any Chinglish signs, please send a picture of it to lizhixin@ynet.com together with your name and address.

By Terry Boyd-Zhang

Honestly, some construction seems to serve no other purpose except to be inconvenient!

I have experienced a lot of inconvenient construction during my free-rolling days, from neighboring apartment renovations to full-scale tear-downs of lovely communities, making way for progress and modernity.

One of the worst was when the management of a bankrupt condominium began work they could not afford to pay for on the unsafe underground parking at my rental condo in Toronto. The drilling went on for months and it was so loud that I could not even make a phone call.

Just after I moved into my current place, someone got married and started renovations in the building next door. I was ready to “inconvenience” those newlyweds, let me tell you!

I swear that the next renovations I want to hear are my own. Unfortunately, at more than 33,000 yuan per square meter, this sound is unlikely to be heard during this lifetime.

I cannot figure out what happened with this sign because it is pretty straightforward in Chinese. In English, grammar is often reversed, so perhaps the translator thought they were being clever to switch it around.

Ci is a fancy word for “here,” di means “this place, here” and shigong is “carrying out construction.” In English, we might put a comma here. Next we see gei (“gives, provides, supplies”) and nin (the polite form of “you.”

Now, if you are studying how to write Chinese characters, you will see that the regular form of “you” is at the top of the character and a “heart” is at the bottom. You have to use “heart” to speak to “you” formally.

Then comes dailai (“to bring about, to bring upon someone”) and bu (“no, not”) bian (“convenient, simple”). You may also see this word near the toilet, for it also means to relieve oneself. Think about it – is life not more convenient after a good excretion?

Lastly, on the sign, we have jing-qing (a formal word for “please,” the regular word is just qing) and finally yuanliang (forgive).

It should be something like: Construction. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Sorry for the inconvenience of correct grammatical construction!

After using the hot water, please back the battle to there

Chinglish on the way

This column aims to identify Chinglish in public areas. If you see any Chinglish signs, please send a picture of it to lizhixin@ynet.com together with your name and address.

By Terry Boyd-Zhang

In ancient China, there was a famous general named Yue Fei. He lived during the Southern Song Dynasty in the 12th century, the time of the Renaissance in Europe.

When the capital of Kaifeng was attacked by the Jurchens and the emperor of the Southern Song was captured, Yue bravely went to fight the evil Jurchens to have his emperor returned. Tragically, Yue was tricked and killed, but he is remembered for his patriotism and loyalty.

Though he left only fragments of instructions for battle, this sign comes from Yue’s memoirs — the English version of how one should retreat. In battle, if dousing your enemies with hot water does not do the trick, you had better hightail it to the hills, regroup and recommence at a new location.

OK, not really. I am making half of the story up. The first character is re, or “hot.” The second of the most basic characters, shui, means “water.” The third is ping or “bottle.” These three characters together mean hot water bottle, or thermos.

You might get a thermos of hot water for tea, if you stay in a motel. The next two characters are also fairly basic: yong means “use” and hou means “after.” The sixth character, we have seen before, qing, or “please.” Next is fang (put) hui (back) yuan (original) chu (place).

So, the confusion of this sign is basically a spelling mistake: “battle” instead of “bottle.” All the grammar errors can be excused and perhaps, if the thermos was obvious enough, native speakers would get the basic idea of this sign. It would be a shame to lose Chinglish — think of all the lies you can tell the folks in the old country!