"A Way With Words"

One of my favorite "feels like being back home" things to do is listen to podcasts of my favorite NPR shows and "A Way with Words" is at the top of the list. Some of you may know it. Recently Greg the quiz guy challenged Martha and Grant to play a little game: he had taken the words to a few well-known Nursery Rhymes and "Babel-ed" them. That is to say he put them into the Babelfish.com translator and took them from English to a foreign language, back to English, then to a second foreign language and back again, sometimes adding a third generation of translations, and Martha and Grant had to identify the original rhyme. The result was hilarious and I am proud to say I was able to name each and every one even before Martha and Grant did! My Chinglish exposure has taught me well. 
It is so hard for me to believe a year has passed but today we celebrate the first anniversary of our arrival as a family in Shanghai. As such I thought it would be a good time to share some of the more entertaining Chinglish examples I have come across in the last few months.   


Hanting Hotels are a local chain. We pass one on a certain route that we often take and it has this sign above it:

I was excited when the grocery store where we frequently shop advertised that it would be hosting a wine fair. This is the sign it posted with the schedule:

I've seen the following sign near a few ponds now:

Since it makes no sense to me I decided to play a little game of my own. I put "no dabbling" into Google Translator, took the resulting Chinese and reverse translated it to see if I would get something relative to water or entering or swimming: "Not involved". Maybe not.

I found this one in a menu while lunching with a friend:

Evil, Evian, maybe this translation is actually on target! (But come on, when all you need to do is copy what the label says into your menu, is there really an excuse for being so far off the mark??)

This one is on all of the fire doors in Heinz's office building. 

It makes me giggle because my first thought was that it was like a movie spoiler and my goofy mind imagined a bunch of zombies on the other side of the door waiting to grab us if we went through!

These signs identify which department you have wandered into in our local super store:

In case you are confused about what you will find in this department, (ignoring the stationary vs. stationery issue...) they have conveniently labeled some of the merchandise: 

This sign is posted at a playground where we sometimes play:

Apparently number 3 was so important that they had to list it twice. It didn't make sense the first time so it's not any more helpful the second!

I think my biggest fear is that some day these things are going to start looking normal to me. That will be the point at which I will KNOW we have been here too long... We're off and running into year number two. Will you join us?