'Please don't climb trees and pick flowers for the sake of life' - makin sense of bilingual tourism signs in China

摘要

This paper deals with Chinglish as Chinese-English translations found on public bilingual signage in the People's Republic of China. After a short review of the existing literature, this study attempts to establish a typology of Chinglish with corpus-based research. Additionally, the corpus serves for geographical and statistical analysis. This study finds that the majority of errors are over-literal translations with grammatical mistakes. Only a few signs feature irrelevant wording, Pinyin or typos. Very few signs feature Gibberish with completely unintelligible word fragments or a random set of characters. The problem does not lie with the sign producer, since most of the time the words appear to be correctly copied and stenciled onto a sign surface, the problem lies with the translator. The number of Propaganda Chinglish signs is very low, given the commercial nature of more than 90% of the corpus. Noticeably, more than 80% of the signs carrying non-commercial information or guidance or warnings do not feature the institution, official bureaus or authorities that issued the signs. Tourism is a major contributor of the corpus with about one fourth of the total number of signs. Further research is needed to elaborate on the decorative use of English in the commercial realm, where the existence of non-Chinese lettering is used to establish an appearance of cosmopolitanism or the status of an international brand. The anonymous nature of the communication between the issuing institution and the general public is another striking feature of the present research results.%本文研究中国大陆中英双语标志上的“中式英语”。在评述前人研究的基础上rn，本文致力于对中式英语图片库的考察以及其类型学和地理分布的考量,rn以阐述中式英语标志存在的社会原因，从而进一步探究当下中国正在经历rn的“英语热”的社会意义，以及中国各单位部门通过带有中式英语的双语标识rn向国际社会展示的中国形象。本研究发现双语标识上的中式英语出现频率rn最高的特点是带有语法错误的逐字翻译，只有少数的标识上出现无关词汇rn，拼音和拼写错误，其次，极少数的标识上出现不完整单词和字母等乱码rn。所以可以推断在标识制作过程中，翻译环节出现问题的可能性最大。另rn外，政治宣传方面的双语标识非常少，而商用标识占中式英语图片库内容rn的90％以上。值得注意的是，其中80％的带有非商业内容的指导性或者警rn告性标识没有任何单位署名。由此本文建议在对双语标识的后续研究中．rn应当着重考量针对以标识上非中文文字的装饰性来树立全球化和国际化形rn象的现象，以及大多数标识与其受众之间的匿名交流现象。