Below are 11 samples of weird English, including some medical software system displays, an escalator sign (escalators and elevators usually have some interesting warnings), a garbled advertisement, and a strangely decorated (presumably fashionable) garment.
Sample 1
Venue: medical clinic in Hangzhou
Location: tablet on wall beside consultation room
Type(s): Task failed successfully
Analysis and commentary: So, there are a lot of screens in medical clinics in waiting areas that handle the sequence of appointments. To protect people’s privacy, the software blocks part of each person’s name. This photo shows what happens normally, and what happens for foreigners, whose names don’t consist of two or three Chinese characters in total.
What happens normally (see the orange text in the top half of the screen) is that the system shows the family name, a placeholder, and the second character of the first name, if there is one. Sometimes the placeholder is a circle, as in this case, and sometimes it’s an asterisk or something (see below).
Why does the system show people’s family names, when that’s exactly what we (in the US) hide when we want to be anonymous? Because family names in China are a lot less unique than family names in the US. In China, many, many, many people have one of the same few family names (i.e., “last names” or surnames), so a family name doesn’t do much to identify a specific person. The family name, which is typically displayed first, consists of one character. A first name (i.e., given name or personal name) consists of two characters, or maybe just a single character.
Upon reflection, I decided that the name-blocking privacy system still works okay for me, since people can’t casually look me up online using my full name.
Sample 2
Venue: medical clinic in Hangzhou
Location: flatscreen monitor in waiting area
Type(s): Task failed successfully
Analysis and commentary: Same thing, but this time with a star placeholder and a few more Chinese examples, including some two-character names. You can see that there are three different people with the family name Wang (王). That’s the most common family name, according to Wikipedia, and I’m not surprised, because there are two in my eight-person department.
Sample 3
Venue: medical clinic in Hangzhou
Location: flatscreen monitor over service counter
Type(s): Lost in translation
Analysis and commentary: This appears to be a literal translation. But what’s “tidal” about this window? Siqi’s theory is that this window is used at peak hours… when the human tide rolls in. (It was quiet when we were there.)
Sample 4
Venue: medical clinic in Hangzhou
Location: hallway wall
Type(s): OK boss, I made the sign international
Analysis and commentary: I’m not sure why someone would translate the less important half of the text of a sign. If I can’t read Chinese, I have no idea what it is the sign is reminding people of. At least it doesn’t say “Important Warning” and then fail to transmit the actual warning. In case you’re curious (who wouldn’t be?) I translated the text in the picture. Apparently it says: “To reduce wait time, please use escalator [instead of elevator].”
Sample 5
Venue: medical clinic in Hangzhou
Location: sign in front of entrance of main building
Type(s): I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore
Analysis and commentary: When have you ever (ever!) seen a timeline in English that went from right to left??? And yet, that’s what this one does. Traditionally, Chinese was written in columns, from top to bottom, right to left. Clearly, parts of that written tradition survive to influence modern graphic design choices, even when the sign isn’t a column.
Sample 6
Venue: medical clinic in Hangzhou
Location: escalator
Type(s): A picture worth a thousand words… or, like, at least 8
Analysis and commentary: In the US, I didn’t encounter escalators much in daily life. In Singapore and China, they’re inescapable. I’ve used them to get down (or up…) to the subway, in shopping malls, and in hospitals, for example. They often have these plastic thingies near where the escalator meets the wall to keep you from hitting your head. A lot of the thingies in Singapore aren’t marked in any way, I guess because they’re there to hit you gently to make you aware of the wall, rather than describe the danger, so it took me a while to figure out what they were for. Anyway, this one has text, but it also has an instructive picture.
Sample 7
Venue: medical clinic in Hangzhou
Location: sign outside ultrasound examination room
Type(s): I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore
Analysis and commentary: I haven’t lived in the US in ages, so I don’t really know, but according to the internet, gender-reveal parties are a big thing there. In China, well… they’re not. Parents aren’t supposed to know the gender of the baby until it’s born. This is a policy that I assume is meant to prevent the abortion of female fetuses.
I imagine it’s probably still possible to bribe an ultrasound technician to reveal a baby’s gender, but I have no idea how risky that is. (Two of my department colleagues who became parents announced the gender after the baby was born and seemed not to know in advance, so 100% of my two data points indicate that nobody bribes ultrasound technicians, fwiw.)
So yeah, if you’re a pregnant woman in China, you could have a baby shower (actually, people don’t do that), but there’s no such thing as a gender-reveal party. China does have a tradition of celebrating a baby’s first 100 days; I went to one of these at a colleague’s house. Apparently, any party before the baby’s birth is thought to attract bad luck; however, there is a tradition of a party one month after birth (and also after 100 days). These traditions are, to me, a reminder of the high infant mortality rates that people suffered in the past (and still suffer in undeveloped parts of the world). Waiting 100 days to really celebrate the birth of a child is a version of “don’t count your chickens” with seriously tragic overtones.
Sample 8
Venue: outside in Hangzhou
Location: on a pedestrian
Type(s): FASHUN
Analysis and commentary: I hesitate to label any weird text on clothing a mistake, because I don’t expect fashion to make sense. This photo came out a little blurry, so I fed it to the image search function in the Taobao mobile app, which found several product listings with images of jackets like the one I saw. Unfortunately, the images I found are also too blurry to discern the exact math problem. But here are two of them anyway.
Sample 9
Venue: in a mobile phone shop in a mall in Hangzhou
Location: on a countertop display
Type(s): Lost in translation
Analysis and commentary: My phone’s screen translator says “Focus on Apple Accessories”.
Sample 10
Venue: medical clinic in Hangzhou
Location: service counter
Type(s): Chinese punctuation
Analysis and commentary: Chinese text doesn’t really have spaces. Therefore, English translations of Chinese text often lack necessary spaces around punctuation marks. This lack irks me on a regular basis, even though I totally understand why it happens. The mistake looks so dang obvious to me that it’s hard to remember that it must not have been obvious to the people that made the sign—hence the result. Sigh. I guess it’s not as if it matters. (Oh, and another thing… the list isn’t parallel: there’s one verb phrase and two noun phrases. And furthermore, the capitalization is inconsistent. Ok, I think I’m done now.)
Sample 11
Venue: medical clinic in Hangzhou
Location: tablet on wall beside consultation room
Type(s): Task failed successfully
Analysis and commentary: One more clinic sign! The software for this one apparently counts the length of the name from both ends, instead of just the left end, and hides everything except the first and last letter. This seems like an improvement, because my name is a lot more mysterious on this sign, but also because hiding the second letter from the left and displaying “everything else” can cause the text to take up a lot more space, if it happens to be long, as shown above.
