Tom Spender

A nice – and increasingly rare – bit of Chinglish in Beijing (on the stairs up to McDs on Gongrentibeilu in Dongsishitiao). Beijing had a serious makeover in 2008 for the Olympic Games that included a purge on erratic but amusing and often poetic or thought-provoking translations from Chinese to English on public signs. The same thing is no doubt happening now in Shanghai in preparation for the Expo in May.

So it’s good to see pockets of eccentricity remain. Here, the Chinese is literally “Little heart (Be careful) floor slippery”, which has been translated to “landslide”. Lots of cracking Chinglish examples have been compiled by a German guy, Oliver Ratke, on his website chinglish.de. But it’s not just one-way traffic – US computing giant Microsoft made one of the biggest blunders in marketing history when in its initial foray into China it opted for a direct translation into Chinese, which rendered Microsoft as “small and flaccid”.

My favourite from 2008 was this sign by an escalator in the World Trade Centre shopping mall in Guomao – good advice for us all…