What's in a name?

A couple more pictures I took down in Guizhou last month...

I can sort of see what's going on with this one. Well, I think it's just a crescent-shaped curve in the river. Odd how the definite article so often intrudes where it's not needed in Chinglish, while it is invariably omitted when it is required.

But this - even by the standards of absurd naming that are rampant in the Chinese property developing business - is just baffling. 300 Seats Out Of Print Waterfront Mansion?? (Can anyone assist with what the Chinese actually means? Maybe it's just a bad translation.)

A Chinese shopping slogan

I hadn't previously realised that the BHG supermarket chain is actually a homegrown Chinese operation - part of the Beijing Hualian Group. Here in Beijing, their outlets are a pretty impressive facsimile of large international supermarkets (much more sophisticated in their offerings than the local versions of Carrefour and Walmart, in fact), but when you get out into China's 'lower tier' cities... well, they're just as chaotic and ramshackle as your typical small neighbourhood supermarket here.

And I'd never seen them use this slogan before -  

FRESH   HEALTH   VALUE   SURPRISE

If I had my English teacher head on, I might object that they should start with the noun FRESHNESS, to maintain grammatical consistency in the list. But it's the SURPRISE at the end that really gets me! I like to be surprised in my shopping - oh yes. (I wonder if they meant SUPPLIES??)

This reminds me of a KFC-ripoff fried chicken shop that briefly set up in the front of a tiny supermarket just over the road from the college where I taught back in my first year in Beijing (I thought I'd written about this before, but Google search can't find it; I had thought I might have mentioned it in this classic early post on here, but no). The business folded after a month or so, but they'd spent quite a bit on their packaging, as if they had ambitions of quickly growing into a chain (I'm pretty sure it was just a one-off store, and not a well-run one). The boxes were printed with an English 'slogan' rather like this one, just a random collection of only vaguely appropriate words. I think it said something like... DELICIOUS   HEALTH   EDIBLE.  Really. Hmm, edible food - my favourite kind!

What's in a name?

I am planning to be down in the pleasant coastal city of Xiamen (known to some as Amoy) at New Year, and have been shopping around on Ctrip for a suitable hotel to stay in.

I am tempted by the Smart Hero Club - who wouldn't be?

The Losing Hotel, on the other hand, projects a rather pessimistic aura. In this period of economic slowdown, I feel more in need of the flamboyant positivity exuded by the Megaboom Business Hotel.

Decisions, decisions.

It's only my sense of humour that keeps me going

This week - a 7-day national holiday in China - I find myself having to edit (substantially rewrite!) three very long and turgid articles on China's international diplomacy, and do the groundwork on two hefty new business articles. All of these projects landed in my Inbox last Friday: this is how people with regular full-time jobs treat freelancers!

Ah well, I'm grateful for the money, I suppose. And I've got bugger-all else to do this week.

It is one hell of a slog, though.

It is only the unintentional hilarity of Chinese rhetoric that relieves the tedium for me. This little gem just made me choke on my coffee:

"The seemingly bright and colourful overcoat could not possibly cover up the patched underwear beneath."

Is this a common Chinese idiom for "Appearances can be deceptive"? Weeble, can you assist on this?

Oh, god, I'm cracking up again. This is the most ridiculous image I've come across in years.

More found humour

I had to go to a couple of meetings down in the city centre this afternoon, and, not being quite sure of the locations from the addresses/directions/'maps' I'd been given, I dug up a couple of old tourist maps I hadn't looked at in ages to doublecheck where I was going. I noticed that one of them marked a Beijing Intentional Hotel. Ah, obviously I'd just misread that; perhaps they'd broken the word in an unusual place, and I hadn't noticed a discreet apostrophe signalling the omission of a syllable. Er, no - they really had spelled it like that. I'm sure you can guess what they actually meant.

Oh, if only there were such a hotel! It would be a novel and thrilling concept for Beijing!

I rather suspect, though, that a contrary theme would better fit the prevailing local business culture and thus enjoy more success. Yes, the rival chain of Chaotic Hotels - including venues like the Inadvertent, the Haphazard, the Unforeseen, and the Random - could easily become a leader in the hospitality industry here.

Inadvertent truths (1)

I needed to get hold of my landlord yesterday (to query why he had not, as promised, turned up with workmen to re-lay the floor on my terrace - after I had dutifully got out of bed bright and early, on what was supposed to have been a holiday, to greet this expected intrusion).

He wasn't available: his phone was switched off, or the battery was dead.

The automated message from China Mobile (one I hadn't ever heard before) said:

The subscriber you have dialled is powerless.

Ah, yes. We all know that feeling from time to time. Especially in China.

[I wonder if that is a message created specifically for the situation where the phone's battery is out of juice? Can the service provider tell why a phone isn't responsive - dead battery, removed battery, switched off, or out of signal reach? I think I've sometimes heard "The subscriber you have dialled cannot be reached"; but the usual message is the classically Chinglish-y "The subscriber you have dialled is power-off."

I've really never heard "The subscriber you have dialled is powerless" before; but I rather like it. It's one of those happy accidents that makes you fall in love with Chinglish all over again.]

Same old same old

The British Chamber of Commerce last week sent me a UK government summary of the European Chamber of Commerce's latest 'position paper' on China. It concluded with the refreshingly frank statement:

"The litany of foreign business complaints in China has barely changed in two years. There has been some patchy progress, but retrenchment in almost equal measure."

By coincidence, the very same day, a friend forwarded me a link to an item (on a China news site I hadn't previously known about) headed China is world's 3rd-wealthies nation (sic). Credit Suisse, apparently, is now predicting that China will overtake Japan as the world's second wealthiest nation by the end of 2016, although it will still have slightly less than half the GDP of the USA. Moreover, this report notes, just a mite Chinglishly, that, "accumulation of fortune will happen alongside the expansion of wealth gap"; i.e., the country's Gini coefficient of income distribution is going off the charts.

But, as the 'academic' I was editing for last week assures us, the Gini coefficient and other such indicators of economic and social instability are 'Western concepts' and DO NOT APPLY to China, because.... well, they just don't. China is different, OK?

The laws of physics only apply selectively here as well, a fact that has been much exploited in the construction of dams and nuclear power stations.

All done with the touch of a bottom

I've spent most of the last 48 hours picking my way through a raft of turgid legal memos, to try to find useful illustrative examples I can use in a writing class (owing to certain scheduling hiccups, we find ourselves trying to cover the last three sessions - of six - in just eight days; and owing to my having been wretchedly ill for the whole of last week, I find myself severely behindhand in the preparation).

The tedious hours of keyboard work are rendered tolerable, though, by the occasional nugget of unintentional humour in my source material.

I was just reading through an overview of the law of contract as it applies to online transactions, and was gratified to learn that the client's website enabled customers to confirm a purchase by just pressing on a special bottom on the screen.

Now, that's what I call "user-friendly"!

What was that?

On trendy Beijing shopping alley Nanluoguxiang, Cultural Revolution era kitsch is very much the flavour-of-the-month (very largely "thanks" [I'm not so thankful about it myself] to the runaway success of one of the earliest boutiques down there, the British-run Plastered T-Shirts).

A little while ago, I spotted this mousemat down there - with the baffling slogan:

All for wife eats to calculate everything painstakingly.

Well, that's how it's rendered in the "English version".  My Chinese isn't up to deciphering the original (Help, Weeble? Anyone?); and I'm afraid it's a bit difficult to make out in this hastily taken snapshot below (god, I hate my digital cameras - but that's another rant!!). I suspect it's an exhortation to housewives to take an especially prudential approach to budgeting for their food shopping.... or something.

Everything happens for a reason

During a bit of comment banter the other day, I happened to recall one of the funniest lines of Chinglish I have ever encountered (well, really just a slip of spelling - but I think most native speakers would have caught it, because of the drastic difference it makes to the meaning).  I can't believe I haven't used it on the blogs before, but.... well, I've done a thorough search and I can't find any trace of it.

One of the training companies I used to be involved with had a contract for grading recruitment exams for a couple of the major international accounting firms (they do a huge trawl through the Beijing universities once or twice a year, and thousands of hopeful candidates apply: the majority of them, amazingly, with negligible English skills and severely challenged even in the field of basic numeracy - which are, funnily enough, the two major requirements).  It was mind-buggeringly tedious work, but if you could keep up a brisk enough tempo - I think we used to aim to get through 15-20 scripts an hour - it was modestly well paid; and there was additional compensation in the occasional gems of Chinglish which would produce moments of rib-tickling hilarity (sometimes, indeed, of mass hysteria, since for the first couple of years we had to do the marking in the company's "office" - actually a friend's apartment, serving dual purpose - so there would be half a dozen or so of us working side by side; and all of us so hyped up that the smallest stifled giggle or hiccup of suppressed mirth would almost invariably prove contagious).

One enduring favourite of mine was a girl who wrote, of her attitude to teamwork, "I will cooperate with my colleagues if necessary."  I felt I could 'hear' her italicized exasperation even in her plain handwritten script.  It's an attitude I have a lot of sympathy with!

Even better, though, was the candidate who, when challenged to make suggestions for improving workplace morale, ventured the idea of introducing a causal Friday.

Oh yes - that is an idea which is long overdue in China!  Let's all practice doing things for a good reason - just for one day of the week.  Little by little, baby steps - can't rush these things!  (Remember when they had a 'Stand In Line' Day campaign prior to the Olympics, to try to encourage civilized queueing at bus stops?  I envisage the same kind of thing in offices throughout the country - government offices, especially - just on Fridays.  Every other day, working practices can continue to be just as inefficient, opaque and illogical as ever; but on this one day, let a glimmer of light shine.)

This is NOT the service you're looking for

In a Chinese Post Office...  the 'Comprehensive Postal Service Counter' (which is the designation of 9 of the 10 serving points in my nearest branch - 5 of the 6 in use when I looked in just now) is NOT equipped to sell stamps.

I think it might have been 综合 (zonghe), rather than 全面 (quanmian) [not sure if there's much difference between them, anyway - Weeble??]; but I can't help feeling that the Chinese concept somehow lacks a certain essential element of what we think of in English as 'comprehensiveness'.

Little obfuscations

Sometimes, the characteristic quirks and foibles of Chinglish can arouse vexation or paranoia in the long-suffering foreign resident.  Many of them seem just rather too conveniently supportive of the national predilection towards obfuscation and evasiveness.

Take the passive voice, for example.  The Chinese are not good with verbs in general; but the idea of making verbs passive seems to escape them completely.  However, their penchant for invariably using the active voice with inanimate subjects nicely divorces the thing - and the associated action, or lack of action - from any human actors.  Hence the implication: this is just something that happened; no-one is to blame.

A few weeks ago, I had applied by e-mail for free tickets to a concert which were supposedly being distributed by one of the embassies sponsoring the event.  After a couple of days, a Chinese staff member sent me the disappointing answer: "Sorry.  The tickets are not providing." - a formulation that deftly avoids telling someone what's actually happening here.  Do you mean "We can't provide you with tickets" or "We haven't been provided with the tickets"?  The tickets don't provide themselves, you know; someone has to do the providing.  Or not.

Truer than he meant

So desperate am I becoming for work that the other day I actually stooped to checking up with an 'institution of higher learning' I'd worked with a while back to see if they had any new courses they might consider hiring me for in the coming semester.

My contact there responded (eventually): "Sorry. Our next course has not been well planned yet."

Well, it's never going to be well planned, is it? I was just asking if they'd decided to try to run something at all.

It gave me a brief smirk, at least. Smirks have been few of late.

Strange question

Recording scripts get decidedly dada-ist at times.

This morning I had several pages of question prompts to read out. These can get particularly weird when the answer is a multiple choice (and, of course, they never tell you what the possible answers are; so if the English in the question is seriously flawed, it can be very difficult to know what to do to fix it).

Today's favourite:

Which of these is NOT the growth point of the passion flower?

(I think they meant: Where do passion flowers NOT grow?)

Schrödinger's Cat in geopolitics

From yesterday's editing yawn-a-thon.....

"China has either the will or the capacity to exclude the U.S. from political influence in East Asia."

Which is it? Perhaps it would be better not to enquire.

Either... or/neither... nor - what's in a negative?

This is one of those mistakes that's just so gosh-darned FUNNY (and inadvertently true?) I could hardly bring myself to correct it.

A boy needs a hobby

The latest gem from the recording studios.....     "What did you do last weekend?"   "I went to the farm to watch the vegetables."     Now, it's tempting to suppose that this is just another instance of the common Chinglish inability to distinguish between watch and see (and indeed look at).  One verb is usually enough for the Chinese, so they tend to use see for all instances of vision.  But even "going to see (or look at) the vegetables" is a bit of an odd thing to say.  Where is the fascination in viewing inert objects which could satisfyingly occupy even an hour or so, let alone a whole weekend?   And there were two or three instances of this curious idea in our scripts today, all occurring within a general theme of 'hobbies & interests'.  (The Chinese are BIG on hobbies & interests - but never, alas, pastimes - and you are considered a social deviant if you don't have one; collecting something is pretty much compulsory, even if it's only pencils.)   So, watching vegetables, it would seem, is now being promoted to the nation's middle school students as a worthwhile leisure time activity.   It will probably become an official job designation soon.  If a few tens of millions of peasants become full-time 'vegetable watchers', the unemployment problem will be solved.       And I get to see these great shifts in social policy right at their inception.  It is one of the few things that makes recording educational materials a satisfying job.

A backhanded compliment

One of the Chinese contacts for whom I undertake regular editing work sent me an e-mail last week, telling me that she and her chief editor had recently met up for dinner with the English woman who first recommended me to her.  (Why do I never get these free dinners from them??) She was trying to tell me how warmly they had both praised my work to my English friend. "Mr Froog usually manages to return the articles in only one or two days.  And amazingly, the editing is quite good." I would have sulked about it…. if I hadn't been guffawing so loudly.

A numbers game

My vacation has been somewhat sullied by offers of work - editing jobs for the policy thinktank back in China, which I felt obliged to accept for the sake of maintaining good relations with them.

This morning's was a particularly painful experience - more explicitly 'political' than most of the articles I rewrite for them, and hence replete with ponderous set phrases from the Chinese Communist lexicon that are pretty much devoid of meaning. (You wouldn't think it possible, would you, to drone on for 10 pages about 'China's model of development' without once mentioning what that model actually is?)

Ordinarily, when I edit pieces like this, the finished version ends up being slightly longer than the original, since Chinglish is chiefly characterized by the frequent omission of small but important words - articles and auxiliary verbs in particular, but also quite often prepositions, especially in phrasal verbs. The Chinese also have a propensity to use pronouns without any clear antecedents, and to pile up strings of clauses or adjectival phrases which make a sentence hopelessly unwieldy, if not completely dislocating its grammar. So, I find I usually have to do a lot of breaking down of 40-word sentences into two or three constituent parts, and then adding in some linguistic grout of my own to smoothe over the cracks. And then they also quite often use jargon phrases or abbreviations which they assume are generally recognised, but in fact need an explanatory gloss. And so on, and so on. In short, they tend to leave out a lot of stuff that a native speaker would expect to be included in order to render the English grammatically complete and readily comprehensible.... so I have to add stuff to fill in all those omissions.

I did a lot of that in today's piece too. But much of it was such hopeless drivel - either so grammatically corrupt as to be irretrievable, or staggeringly turgid and repetitive - that the only sensible 'fix' was to delete whole chunks of it.

Starting word count: 4,680

Final word count: 3,400

That is a stunning reduction in wasteful verbiage.

(And if I'd been writing it in English myself from scratch, I could have brought it under 1,500 easily.)

Another Chinese condom guffaw

I thought I'd wrung all the mirth possible out of condoms in China the other week, but no - here's another one.

Local market leader Strong Man has brought out a new variety called..... URLTA.

I am not making it up.

Nuance

Another gem from the recording studios.....

A fairly typical scenario: a businessman returns to his office after lunch and his assistant passes on the messages left while he was out.

"Someone calling himself Professor Li phoned. He asked for you to call him back as soon as possible."

How we laughed!

And this is a slightly tricky one to explain, because it is possible, native speakers do use this construction from time to time.

But.... it's a very non-standard way of introducing someone's name. And it tends to imply doubt or disbelief.

That is to say, you'd use it when you find the person's name odd, unlikely, laughable, and you're inclined to make a joke about it.

Or maybe when you're hesitant about passing the information on because you're worried you got the name down wrongly and are looking for confirmation or reassurance from the person you're telling.

Or where you think the person was obviously using a fake name - a phoney, an imposter, call the police!

But not when you're simply passing on telephone messages.