The Chinglish
By yibinghua
@yibinghua (64)
China
August 2, 2009 3:22am CST
One of the things you notice as a foreigner in China is the mistranslations, the signs, t-shirts, and shop names that has incorrect english spelling. Foreigners actually have a name for it, they call it "Chinglish" it's the chinese mixed with english. Foreigners never understood why before them started to learn chinese. The reason is that if you translate a chinese sentence word by word into english you get something that makes no sense, because the grammar in chinese and english are completely different. But either way, it makes someone so much funnier to find these misspellings all over town.
5 responses
@Simon1223 (903)
• China
7 Sep 09
To a large extent Chinglish reflects Chinese's way of thinking, so it's not strange that sometimes foreigners could not understand it. So long as the difference between China and West exists and most Chinese don't understand Western way of thinking, Chinglish will exist. Take another example, Indians usually speak English with obvious accent. But those educated Indians could understand Western way of thinking, so they are able to communicate with British or Americans in profound subjects.
@sybil02 (185)
• Philippines
2 Aug 09
I saw a lot on the web about how they translate their local language to English and It came out wrong the worse of that it can have different meaning altogether. I have to admit some have very funny translation. I frequently visit this website engrish dot com and I must admit I LMAO everytime I visit the site.
