“English” on signs in Wuyi and Jinhua

Below are five funny English text samples I saw on a brief road trip with my husband Siqi and his parents to Wuyi, Zhejiang Province (a city with a population of 460,000). On our way back to Hangzhou, we passed through Jinhua, Zhejiang Province (a city with a metro area population of 1,258,000).

Sample 1

Venue: the Vienna International Hotel in Wuyi
Location: beside elevator/lift in the lobby
Type(s): weird word choice

Analysis and commentary: “Pilot View” is interesting in that we’d never call it that, even though you can, I suppose, imagine flying a plane over the interior of a building and seeing down into all the rooms.

The “you are here” star is missing entirely from (what should be called) the floorplan; it should be over on the left in the alcove in front of the two elevators, which are the little rectangles with X’s in them. (It’s amazing how many weird ways people have written “you are here” in English… I think my favorite so far is “HERE YOU ARE”.)

I think “run through” means “run away (escape) by means of”. Anyway, the idea here is clear in both cases, there’s just this whimsical flavor to the text.

Oh, and why is the picture for “Do not take lift” green instead of red? Colorblind graphic designer???

Sample 2

Venue: the fluorite museum in Wuyi
Location: floor
Type(s): The Department Of Signs That Say The Opposite Of What They Mean; misspelling

Analysis and commentary: I was so busy noticing one of my favorite mistranslations of “Caution: Slippery” that I completely failed to notice the poor English on the arrow until I started typing this blog post! “Jewelry/Jewellery” is also misspelled on the map in the entrance hall, although (thankfully) they managed to get “fluorite” correct, lol.

Sample 3

Venue: mall in Jinhua
Location: wall
Type(s): weird word choice

Analysis and commentary: I’m not sure how I’d write “self-service”. They mean DIY, but I don’t know if restaurants use that. I think “unlimited quantity/amount” would have been better than “infinite quantity”, but industry standard is “all-you-can-eat buffet”. Restaurants in Singapore write “free flow” even for things that aren’t liquids, like bread. And speaking of bread, they don’t mean “baking”, they mean “grilling”.

Grammar aside, I love the mathematical sound of “infinite quantity”. It’s incongruous but delightful on a restaurant ad. It’s like, hey guys, let’s go eat with Buzz Lightyear. We can eat to infinity… and beyond!

(Editing the photo of this poster, I learned a new Photoshop trick that now I feel silly for never using before. There’s a crop tool setting that can directly straighten out the perspective if I didn’t take a photo directly in front of something, the same way my phone camera can flatten out a photo of a document on a table even when I didn’t take the photo from directly overhead.)

Sample 4

Venue: rest stop between Jinhua and Hangzhou
Location: the inside of the door of the toilet stall
Type(s): Department Of Signs That Say The Opposite Of What They Mean; English grammar is hard, y’all

Analysis and commentary: Another sighting of “Carefully Slide”!

This “Keep Your Belongings” is reminiscent of Singapore’s use of “keep” to mean “put away” (because Singlish doesn’t distinguish between active and stative verb pairs, like “put on” and “wear”, and uses the latter for both).

But “put away” doesn’t really make sense here. Maybe it means “always keep your belongings with you“? But what it really means is “be sure you take all your stuff when you leave”. I’m not sure how to write that on a sign, tbh. Sign-ese is a whole other language, and has its own grammar, punctuation, and capitalization rules!

Sample 5

I have saved the best for last, even though Sample 4 is chronologically latest.

Venue: mall in Jinhua
Location: side of coffee stall counter
Type(s): transcription error

The utter, absolute, beautiful comedic timing of this sign is spectacular. For a few moments, I really believed this coffee stall managed to hang up a poster with an inspirational quote in perfectly correct English, including the apostrophes in the contractions, and then… nope!

We must all learn to DANCE IN THE RAM.

(Maybe it’s good advice?)