Beijing’s new guidelines aim to rid city of Chinglish

NE_Tigress

Currently, Beijing has taken another step forward in the battle against Chinglish street signs. The city has enacted new guidelines to provide consistent renderings of Chinese into English on public thoroughfares, said Zhang Qian, a Deputy Director of the Foreign Affairs Office of the People's Government of Beijing Municipality.

A launching ceremony for this series of activities to correct foreign language used in public signs was held at Beijing Foreign Studies University and sponsored by the Beijing Multilingual Service Center. More than 500 volunteers came from the Beijing Foreign Studies University, China Foreign Affairs University, Renmin University of China, Communication University of China, University of International Relations to participate in this activity.

It was reported that the volunteers will be assigned to the Beijing Capital International Airport(BCIA), the underground station, Summer Palace, Beijing Friendship Hospital, National Stadium (also known as the Bird's Nest) and Water Cube to provides image acquisition and well-collated words services.

The volunteers will establish a database for the foreign language signs on the Internet, and then non-standard names will be corrected by a professional team of translators.

The usual language logos will be integrated into a unified database, including "No Smoking," "No Visitors" and "Baggage Depository." If a public place would like to add or improve a logo, they can check the related information by the available database in order to avoid embarrassment in public.

The database specifically aims to increase the information on the French language this time. With the increasing demands for small language translation services, the database will also add small language services in the future, including Spanish, Russian, Italian, Korean and so on.

WHITEPRlDE

What's wrong with Chinglish?

semensammy

Originally posted by WHITEPRlDE at 2010-12-16 22:14
What's wrong with Chinglish?

Snappy is the only bad egg

timbatu

It will not happen because the Chinese population has poor English.

Everynowhere

Good project.
Most Chinese know english better than the average American knows Chinese. And just imagine, China is, in contrast to many other nations, smart enough to also use english for public signs. You'll never see that in France or in Russia...

Anyway, I've also had my fun with those wrong signs and just say:

protect the circumstances!

timbatu

Originally posted by Everynowhere at 2010-12-16 22:31
Good project.
Most Chinese know english better than the average American knows Chinese. And just imagine, China is, in contrast to many other nations, smart enough to also use english for public s ...

Is there tangible benefit for adding English into Chinese road signs? Or is it just another dumb waste of money?

WHITEPRlDE

Originally posted by timbatu at 2010-12-16 22:38


Is there tangible benefit for adding English into Chinese road signs? Or is it just another dumb waste of money?

People as you, who do not know chinese can come and learn to know China.