At age 10, David was already seeing some horribly wrong English in Beijing. In a card asking for customer opinions at a restaurant in the capital, readers were greeted with typos, grammar fails, and gibberish. It was funny, but not very.
Fast forward to over 30 years later, and David Feng is one of the most authoritative sources on languages, especially “Chinglish-busting”, in Beijing. His 2013 plan to standardise Rail English across China stopped the worst Chinglish in its tracks (“Stop mouth” in place of Entrance), and gradually standardised and upgraded English across the network.
He now is a member of many professional groupings, including those serving or being affiliated with Beijing City Hall and public-facing institutions, as well as railway stations and onboard services of the Chinese railways and metro systems. With his watchful eye, signage is properly translated between English and Chinese.
Yet elsewhere, Chinglish dies hard. Today, the new menace is from a mix of limited competence, negligence, as well as excess reliance on machine translation, and more recently, AI. Large language models, unfortunately, are far from linguistically “purified”, and have Chinglish mixed in as well.
This blog is, first of all, not here to “just” make readers laugh (although this is a natural reaction!). Different from others, the site gives readers the solution in terms of recommended translations, and dives into the reason why these signs exist in the first place.
Because David knows both English and Chinese well, he is then able to dive in as to what the sign is supposed to mean — and how it got mistranslated. More importantly, he’s also able to “think in reverse” — as in how these signs might be seen in a “usual” setting abroad, and how it might end up in Chinese.
The Chinglish Blog — not so much for the laughs — but also, the learning!
