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Beijing aims for gooder English before 2008 Olympics
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by Kaitlin | April 13, 2007 at 08:33 am
1933 views | 10 Recommendations | 3 comments
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Beijing is scrapping thousands of signs with poor English translations before the 2008 Olympic games next year. The move has prompted responses of nostalgia among many who've lived or traveled in China--there's the very popular Engrish.com, and there's even a Facebook group called "Save the Last Chinglish" that aims to retain signs in their awkwardly-phrased glory.
The host city is taking aim at sloppy and often hilarious translations that dot the city to avoid Olympic-sized embarrassment over menu items such as "fried crap" and attractions like the "Racist Park" -- a venue dedicated to ethnic minorities."So far I think we have achieved good progress in standardising English translations of signs," Liu Yang, a Beijing municipal official involved in the effort, told a press conference on the results of the campaign so far.
Launched last year, the campaign resulted in 6,530 transport-related signs in Beijing being revised or replaced by the end of 2006. More than 1,000 others were dealt with at tourist spots around the city.
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (3)
at 08:57 on April 13th, 2007
Isn't there some bad grammar in your headline? Didn't you mean "goodest"?
at 00:19 on April 16th, 2007
Even in cosmopolitan Shanghai, it's rare to see a sign where the English is 100% correct, spelling mistakes, awful grammar and stuff that just plain doesn't make sense is rampant.
at 11:07 on July 27th, 2007
This is the sort of story that people could add photos to all the time - nice item!
And speaking of that...wouldn't it be great to have a way of keeping track of these evergreen items?