Preparing for the Chinglish assault
Jimmy cleaned out his office at work yesterday in order to pack up boxes for the company to ship to his new office. He brought home lots of goodies. One was a book that I absolutely love, Chinglish: Found in Translation by Oliver Lutz Radtke. This is a subject that I expect to be addressing again and again for the next two years, but a brief orientation is worthwhile.
The most amazing thing about written English in China is that it is everywhere! We will be moving to northeast China (Manchuria) where the presence of Westerners (with the exception of Russians and other slavic speakers) has been minimal up until the last decade. Nonetheless, it seems like every sign there includes an English translation. I can find no particular reason for this.
The outcome of poorly researched translations from Chinese to English is quite natural. With my limited understanding of Chinese, if I were to translate English sentences into Chinese using English grammatical structures, it would be equally awkward gibberish to the Chinese (and doing it verbally where tones matter would doubtless render it incomprehensible). Chinese and English have almost nothing in common.
For native Chinese speakers translating into English, one of the key obstacles seems to be the subtle meanings contained in the overwhelmingly large English vocabulary. As noted by Robert McCrum, William Cran and Robert MacNeil in The Story of English, "The statistics of English are astonishing. Of all the world's languages (which now number some 2,700), it is arguably the richest in vocabulary." The photo above illustrates that the simple error of inserting a blank space has an unexpectedly funny outcome. (Seriously, I nearly wet myself everytime I see this photo.)
Chinese is essentially the opposite, limited by a somewhat small set of allowed vowel and consonant combinations (modified by tones to increase the number of possible sounds) and by the nature of its written expression. Using a "character" set which is a combination of ideograms, pictograms, phono-semantic compounds, ideogrammic compounnds (thanks Wikipedia!), etc., seems to limit the absolute number of words any given individual can master. Thus, the language as whole develops without expanding the total number of words at nearly the rate that English does.
English grammar and Chinese grammar are also quite different. Chinese is what I could describe as a programmatic language. (I have no idea if this is a legitimate linguistic term, it's just my impression.) There are lots of grammatical constructs to learn in Chinese, going far beyond the idea of subject-verb-object. Translating these constructs into intelligible English expressions requires a high-level of Engish literacy.
Thus it is that the native English speaker finds himself being incessantly confronted with Chinglish in China. A great deal of it is just barely comprehensible, some of it clear without being grammatically correct, some of it is perfect English, and some of it is so freakin' funny that books are written about it.
I highly recommend both of the books mentioned here for anyone who enjoys language.
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Our dealings with the bureaucracy have been limited thus far. I should have blogged about getting a physical at a Chinese clinic in order to get our visas. It was like being beamed back into the 50s, with added bureaucracy. The Chinese love a rubber stamp!
Our next hassle will be the importation of our "stuff." The list of prohibited and limited items is not long, but, in the case of books and media, somewhat vague. Basically, we shouldn't try to bring in anything that would contradict China's version of Chinese history (especially 20th century history). So we're paranoid as hell. We have had two years preparing for this move, so we've purchased a lot of Chinese history books which we would naturally love to take with us.
pay attention to your bag!
In one case, a label for a hand dryer ( 烘手機) became "Bake the Cell Phone."
Does anyone have a theory on why there are signs in English all over China, even in areas not frequented by foreigners? I just don't get it.
Things could very well be different now, especially since the Olympics but on media, in the 1990s, a Sports Illustrated was considered porn. Dvds might not be such an issue today because I think almost all of them are made there. The do not contradict China rule usually runs like this: my father was helping the Chinese install the control systems in a power plant. A rat got into some equipment and shorted it out. Officially, there are no rats in China, so because the equipment was from France, the rat was too. Workers were told to put part A into part B. Part B was the wrong size. Workers still put part B into part A, breaking both parts because when an official tells you to do something, you do it without question.
Even in the most rigid American companies, the line of authority is at least a bit fuzzy. A worker with a good idea is expected to speak up. My husband's company is very "old school" (especially, to me, compared to my most recent employer, Cisco Systems). Yet they certainly rely on technical experts who speak up when they want/need to. Much, much less of this sort of thing seems to occur in China.
This, one would think, is a real impediment to innovation. I think one of the long term challenges for China in its attempts to develop more home-grown industries will be overcoming this structural rigidity in the business environment (while trying to maintain exactly the opposite in the general public).
Nonetheless, China continues to thrive on its ability to commoditize the shit that others invent. They are riding a long wave of success which may very well carry them into the next stage without many many wipe-outs.