【英语中国】可笑可乐的中国特色英语

The 'Great Taipei Shoes Store' may not know it yet, but I've just renamed it the 'Dataibei Shoe Store.' I also think foreigners in Changzhou, the Chinese city where I live, will find 'No Unaccompanied Children' much clearer than 'Taking Care of Teenager.'

'Chinglish,' the bizarre but often entertaining mixture of Chinese and English that's ubiquitous in T-shirts, storefronts and street signs here, was recently targeted for elimination by the Chinese government. It was Beijing's latest attempt to modernize China by making it as bland as possible.

This order somehow filtered through the serpentine levels of the Chinese bureaucracy to the translation department of the Jiangsu Teacher's University of Technology, a school that produces mostly middle-school and high-school teachers. I teach English and history there, which makes me, in Chinglish, a 'foreign expert,' a phrase that itself needs a new translation. I'm not really an expert in much of anything besides being foreign.

The translation department compiled a number of pictures of suspect signs from all over this city of three million, about 100 miles west of Shanghai, and took its best crack at fixing the more egregious errors. At some point, the translators decided they needed help from the foreign experts to complete the national directive.

So I and another foreigner teacher were invited to consult. I think the translation department figured we would simply give their work some finishing touches, but we realized we needed to start from scratch. A number of their translations were better than the indecipherable original, but they still were mostly literal translations, even when they made no sense in English.

'Chinese Characteristic Mall' might have been an improvement over 'Chinese Characteristic Commerce Street,' but it still took me a while to understand that the translators were trying to say 'Traditional Chinese Mall.' That name was ironic anyway - the mall is so Western that if you removed the Chinese characters decorating some stores, you could plop it down in Albuquerque and no one would think it was out of place.

A few of the signs were also so misspelled that I needed to ask the meaning of each individual character in the Chinese word. That way, I figured out that 'No Talls in Disorder' should be translated as 'No Street Vendors.'

The work was a lot harder than I thought it would be. For every 'Fire Channel' I could quickly rename 'Fire Exit' there were puzzles and cultural references that were hard to decipher. For instance, the Chinese like to brag in their signs. While there's nothing wrong with saying that the third floor of a mall has 'Famous International Brands of Women's Clothing,' I figured 'Women's Clothing' was sufficient for a floor sign.

The hardest task, though, was translating a paper written to promote Changzhou's businesses. The gallery of translation teachers sitting behind us insisted that we keep 'top national brands' and 'famous Chinese brands' in separate lists, even though we thought that no English speaker would understand the difference between the two. We lost that fight.

The other foreign expert and I also had to convince our Chinese colleagues not to make up their own words in English. We had to explain that 'silver-collar' didn't really mean a worker who was more senior than 'white collar.' We won that one.

The Chinese translation teachers wanted us to give reasons for every change we suggested. We may have been less diplomatic than we could have been. They weren't happy with us for calling some of their translations 'completely senseless.'

One of the translation teachers told me later that they planned to submit the recommendations to the local government, which was charged with fixing the signs and papers. Many of our suggestions made it into the report, especially our explanations for why changes should be made. The signs will stay the same for now, but I imagine that one day, without warning, 1,000 workers will suddenly appear - they never do anything small in China - and the signs will be replaced in an instant.

It was a big kick to get to name things I've seen. I've been to the 'Confidant Boathouse,' and I can't wait to go back and see it as the 'Friendship Boathouse.' But I'm afraid we're losing a little of the fun of living in China. The country will lose a little of its uniqueness when signs like 'Taking Care of Teenager' disappear, and the locals start worrying instead about unattended children.

“大台北鞋店”或许还不知道，我刚把它的英文名字从“Great Taipei Shoes Store”改成“Dataibei Shoe Store”。我还认为在我居住的常州市，要想表达“请看好您的孩子”，外国人会认为“No Unaccompanied Children”比“Taking Care of Teenager”要明白的多。

Daniel Bruno DavisChinglish（中国式英语）是中文和英语的怪诞结合体，但通常十分有趣，在中国的T恤衫、店名招牌和指路牌中比比皆是。它近期成为中国政府意欲消灭的目标。这也是北京政府想让中国实现现代化的最新努力，让中国尽可能地变得毫无个性。

这一命令不知如何透过复杂的中国官场下达到了江苏技术师范学院的翻译系。这是一所主要培养中学及高中老师的院校，我在这里教英语和历史。因此用中国式英语讲，我是一名 “foreign expert(外国专家)”。这一短语本身也需要一个新译法。除了是个外国人，我在大多数方面并不是一名真正的专家。

Daniel Bruno Davis常州市位于上海以西约100英里，人口300万。翻译系从常州的各个角落收集了大量的可疑标语的照片，并尽其最大努力修改了那些更异乎寻常的错误。在某种程度上，这些翻译者认为他们需要得到外国专家的帮助以完成这个国家级指令。

因此，他们邀请我和另一位外国教师为其提供咨询。我认为翻译系估计我们仅需给他们的工作润润色，但我们意识到我们需要从头开始。他们的许多翻译均优于那些令人无法理解的原始译法。但新译法仍大多数只是直译，在英语里甚至毫无意义。

“Chinese Characteristic Mall”或许要好于“Chinese Characteristic Commerce Street”，但我仍然想了一会儿才明白译者想表达的是“具有中国特色的商业中心”（Traditional Chinese Mall）。但这个说法也有些讽刺的意味，因为这家购物中心太西化了，如果把装饰某些店铺的中国元素拆掉，就算把它放在美国新墨西哥州，也没人会觉得它格格不入。

一些标语还出现了十分离谱的拼写错误，以至于我需要问清楚中文的每一个字是什么意思。通过这种方式我才明白“No Talls in Disorder”是指“No Street Vendors（不得摆摊设点）”。

工作比我想像中要难的多。我可以迅速把“Fire Channel”改成“Fire Exit”（消防通道），但有些难题和文化典故却难以破译。例如，中国喜欢在标识中自吹自擂。尽管说购物中心三层出售“著名国际品牌女装（Famous International Brands of Women's Clothing）”并没有错，但我认为对楼层标志而言，“女装（Women's Clothing）”便足矣。

然而，最艰难的任务是翻译一篇宣传常州商业的文章。坐在我们身后的大批翻译老师坚持要求我们把“top national brands（国家顶级品牌）”和“famous Chinese brands（中国著名品牌）”分列两项，尽管我认为没有一个说英语的人能够理解两者之间的差异。我们输了这一局。

我和另一名外国专家还不得不说服我们的中国同事不要自己用英语造词。我们不得不解释“silver-collar（银领）”并不意味着真的比“white collar（白领）”更高级。这局我们赢了。

中国的翻译老师希望我们为每一处建议的改动附上理由。或许我们处理这个问题的时候本来可以更圆滑一些。我们说他们的部分译法“完全不通”，他们不高兴了。

后来，其中一名翻译老师告诉我，他们计划把这些建议译法提交给负责修订这些标识和文章的当地政府。我们的许多建议被写进了报告，特别是我们对为什么要做出此类修改的解释。眼下这些标识还毫发无损地呆在原处，但我想在没有任何征兆的情况下，某一天会突然有1,000名工人出现在街头，瞬间把这些标识全换掉。中国人做什么事情都喜欢大张旗鼓。

为见过的东西改名字是一件很令人兴奋的事。我曾去过友谊船库，那时它的英文名字叫“Confidant Boathouse”，而我现在有些迫不及待地想再去看看它的新英文名字“Friendship Boathouse”。但这样一来，恐怕我们在中国的生活会略失乐趣。当“Taking Care of Teenager”之类的标语消失之后，这个国家便失去了一点点独特性，当地人担心的不再是“青少年”(teenager)，而是没人照管的孩子了。