Well, that’s one of the weirdest titles I’ve ever written. The Chinese language has a few awesome quirks, probably acquired through thousands of years of use. One of my favourite things is the way they combine or compound words to make a whole new word, often with a different meaning. Sometimes, the words are opposites. For example, the word zuǒyòu (左右), literally means “left right”, but put together the word comes to mean “approximately” […]
Archive for the ‘Chinglish’ Category
Looks like I’ve been more than a little remiss with my blogging over the last month or so. I’ve got a very bad habit of starting blogs and then not updating them. My problem is that I only like blogging when I feel like I have something to say, when really I should just be doing plenty of little updates. In all honesty, I haven’t been up to very much in the last month or so that has been particularly exciting… but then, this is supposed to be a blog about living in Shanghai, not […]
Mandarin Chinese is really an amazingly interesting and intricate language, and the more I learn, the more interesting it becomes. One interesting facet of Chinese is how they render western words in Chinese. Translating things like product names can be difficult, because you have to transliterate the sound of the words into Chinese as best you can, but the words should also have some kind of relevant meaning. Before Coca Cola was first introduced to China […]
As anybody who knows me will tell you, I have an unhealthily immature obsession with anything to do with the face. I don’t know why. I just love the face. What’s not to love? I’m also a big fan of Chinglish and badly translated signage. So you can imagine how excited I was to see “Lamb face” on the menu at a local noodle place called “Surface”. Unfortunately you don’t really get a sheep’s head in a bowl if you order it – it’s a fairly obvious, if slightly strange mistranslation […]
No China blog is complete without some pictures of awful English translations on signs, menus and posters. I’ve already taken enough in the last 6 months to fill up a few albums. However, sometimes one just jumps out at you. On Wednesday we went to lunch at a Sichuan place we hadn’t been to before. […]