Considering how few foreigners speak really good Chinese, isn’t the media’s Chinglish coverage a little excessive? True, occasionally phrases on signs are extremely funny, so it makes sense that the subject gets some attention. However, after dozens of stories on the topic, it definitely begins to feel a bit mean-spirited.

Now you might doubt that the coverage is as ubiquitous as I claim, but it only took a peek around the internet to prove the point. There were prominent Chinglish stories on the news websites of ABC, NBC, and CBS (I thought CBS had eliminated their news division!). If you include all of the podcast reports, the number goes up several fold. Out of all of the stories, only one from PBS’s NewsHour, which focused on a former American army officer who is helping the government clean up its act, seemed to focus on anything other than laughing at poor translations.

The tipping point for me was listening to a BBC reporter (via podcast) who, from what I could tell, had fairly rudimentary Chinese skills. His piece essentially mocked a restaurant that had 口水鸡 (kou shui ji) translated as “Saliva Chicken” (a more palatable name would be “Mouth Watering Chicken”). He haltingly asked the waitress zhe shi shenme (“what is this?”), although it seemed unlikely he would understand the response, or more to the point, cared to.

Presumably the emphasis of the BBC story was China’s attempts to eliminate its Chinglish problem before the Olympics. Part of the effort involves setting up a hotline for people to call about menu questions, and to alert Beijing about potentially embarrassing signs. However, the story’s clear intention was to mock the errors as a point of humor.

Why do so many translations end up mangled, anyway? Much of the problem stems from the fact that Chinese words tend to come in 2-character increments. Often they can be matched together to create phrases (one author described them as ‘Lego pieces’). Typically individual characters are used to represent full words as a type of short-hand. If you do not know what word combination each hanzi, or character, comes from, you would be unlikely to guess the correct meaning.

Here is a very simple example:

The “Workers’ Stadium” in Beijing is officially called 工人体育场 (gongren tiyuchang). However, few people use its full name, instead shortening it to 工体 (gongti). If you actually look at the characters, there is no reason to guess that they correspond with the phrase “Workers’ Stadium.” “工” is commonly used in words relating to work. Assuming someone could guess that it stands for ‘workers’ here, then they would look at “体” for clues. Ti tends to mean body, like in 身体 (shenti). If you did not know that “体” used with other characters tends to relate to athletics, then a fair guess would be “workers’ body.” That sounds like a union, not a stadium.

This example is a bit crude, but it illustrates how poorly Chinese and English correspond. When people who are not fluent try to translate things into English they look at each individual character, translating them separately, assuming the combinations make sense. Furthermore some look in dictionaries and fail to differentiate among synonyms that have clear differences in emphasis.

Now, I love a good Chinglish phrase as much as the next guy, but let’s not kill the locals for not knowing our language when most foreigners here only speak basic Chinese at best. (Note to ‘experts’: please write a 1,500 word essay in which you do not mangle any phrases. If you do, that’s great, but you can see that it is not as easy as it seems.) My point is not to bash foreigners for their Chinese, but instead to urge people to have some sympathy for business owners doing their best to make things accessible to tourists.

Let me make two final points to bring the argument home. First, how many restaurants in the West, outside of tourist areas, have any foreign languages on their menu (excluding English)? And that is in countries where there are tons of foreigners and immigrants. Second, who usually works at small restaurants in China? It is certainly not the country’s highly educated class. Usually it is people who have not studied at university and have virtually no English background.

All in all, I think it is well over due to cut locals a break on Chinglish. Of course, if I ran a restaurant, I might ask a frequent customer to proof-read the menu before printing 5 dozen copies.

(This article is a modified version of an entry that appeared in Daily Tea Leaves, a blog that appears on China Expat.)