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| World Home » Life Style » | Thu. Nov 20, 2008 |
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China to promote use of standard English names for food MIL/ANI/Agenies, Dec 22, 2006. London, December 22, 2006 - The Beijing administration is as part of its image building exercise ahead of the 2008 Olympics, setting menus with standardized English spelling and signs at restaurants across the capital as per ANI. Misspelt foods like "complicated cake", "pee soup", "five sliced things", "dumpling stuffed with the ovary and digestive glands of a crab" and, "crap in the grass", the carp literally getting translated as crap, are being banished from the city’s eating places. But chefs are still in favour of direct translations from Chinese, or rather prosaic descriptions of the food on offer. But it not only the restaurants where one can witness the English language getting slaughtered due to funny translation and wrong spellings. Examples abound in shopping complexes and malls with signboards displayed "fuck the certain price of goods". At many places the English translation for the Chinese word "entrance" becomes "Enter the mouth". And at restaurants denoting "children is not recommended", the phrase assumes a different connotation altogether. The messages range from linguistically marvellous to the plain baffling. A certain spa in the capital building promises a "babble bath" instead of a bubble bath, while a Starbucks outlet at the airport offers buyers a "fresh fruit howl" instead of a fruit bowl. While property advertisements such as skyscrapers, become "a wonder of national cream", roads signs put in English somehow seem to lose their meaning in the jumble of words. "No blowing of horn. Keep silence!" or "notice the rockslide, please is run about by cliff" are literally omnipresent. As such, the city administration is burning the mid night oil to rectify the glaring mistake to avoid red faces ahead of the Olympics. According to the Independent, the Chinese government has set up a major drive to standardise the use of English in public, and called the "Beijing speaks to the world committee," to scour the capital seeking out menus or road signs lost in mistranslation.
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