I understand almost no written Chinese. But my eyes and brain still pay attention to text in my environment in China. The result is that English text jumps out at me wherever there is any. English text appears even in places where there are few if any people who might be expected to read it. And since there are few if any people who do read it, getting it exactly correct is not a priority; thus it doesn’t tend to turn out exactly correct, though usually it’s clear what was meant, just from the context.
The fun is spotting surprises.
Surprises include signs that give instructions that I usually don’t see on signs; signs that are so badly translated that the meaning is totally lost; signs from The Department Of Signs That Say The Opposite Of What They Mean; signs that display lorem ipsum or other placeholder text; strange ways of writing familiar ideas; spellings that reveal how people write or pronounce English words when they don’t really know which letters and sounds should be there; and grammar, capitalization, and punctuation mistakes that highlight how difficult English is from the perspective of someone whose language follows different principles altogether.
(As you can see, much fun is also in the analysis!)
Meanwhile, English words on clothing can be surprising because they aren’t necessarily expected to mean anything at all! In the English-speaking world, my impression is, the people who create or wear clothing decorated with Asian writing are mainly anime/manga geeks who’d be likely to know what it says—although, to be fair, there are amusing corners of the internet dedicated to photos of mirrored, error-ridden, insulting, or nonsensical Asian-language tattoos, which you’d think people would be more careful with than clothing! But in Asia, many people wear stuff with English words on it, and even if they can read it, maybe they don’t always bother to: the English is just decoration.
Below are three samples of weird English: two safety stickers (those are almost always good for a laugh) and a garment featuring decorative (rather than correct) English.
Sample 1
Venue: medical clinic in Hangzhou
Location: glass wall in front of window
Type(s): weird word choice; English grammar is hard, y’all
Analysis and commentary: The choice of “crossing” is interesting. The picture suggests “climbing” to me, but the word choice reflects a focus on the fact of passing a barrier rather than the means of doing so. See below for thoughts on the grammar of “DO NOT THROWING”.
Sample 2
Venue: same medical clinic in Hangzhou
Location: exterior of elevator/lift door
Type(s): missed meaning; weird word choice; terrible translation; English grammar is hard, y’all
Analysis and commentary: I quite like “Danger by door”. Sounds kind of like “Death by drowning.” The pictures suggest “Do not lean on door” and thereby “Avoid falling”. There’s an interesting difference between “prevent” and “avoid”: different kinds of transitivity, I think. You “prevent someone from doing something”, whereas you “avoid something” yourself.
My theory is that “do not grilled door” is from the third character, which is pronounced “ba”, like the first syllable of “bar-be-cue”.
The incorrect use of “-ed” in “Do not grilled”, like the incorrect use of “-ing” in “Do not throwing” above, is unsurprising. Since Chinese doesn’t have verb endings at all, native speakers find it difficult to intuit what our verb endings are for. The funny version of this problem is when people say “I’m so boring” instead of “I’m so bored,” a common mistake!
Alternatively, “DO NOT THROWING” could signal that someone started to write “NO THROWING” and changed his mind halfway through.
I kind of think there might be a difference between “NO [VERBING]” and “DO NOT [VERB]”. If a sign says “No Smoking”, maybe it means you can’t smoke right here right now, but under other circumstances, you can. Meanwhile, “Do Not Litter” might mean littering is always bad, and you should never do it. According to a quick Google image search, we apparently don’t write signs that say “Do Not Smoke” (although there are a few that say “Please Do Not Smoke”. But there signs that say “No Littering”, so maybe I’m reading too much into things.
Sample 3
Venue: shopping mall in Hangzhou
Location: back of person’s coat
Type(s): misspelling
Analysis and commentary: This coat wants to say ATTITUDE so badly! All the letters are there! (I checked!) I also checked whether this might be a brand name. Like, it’s conceivable that someone wrote the word this way on purpose, and I’m just not hip enough to know. However, results of a Google search indicate that nobody spells anything this way. So I think in this case, Occam’s Razor wins: this appears to be a genuine mistake!
