Monday, February 5, 2007

Cleaning up Chinglish

The Wall Street Journal has a story today (subscription, $) about Beijing officials' push to revise the city's mangled English signs in time for the 2008 Olympics:

Teams of linguistic monitors will patrol the city's parks, museums, subway stations and other public places searching for gaffes to fix.

Signs like "Green Grass Dreading Your Feet" -- i.e., Keep Off the Grass -- have their fans, who collect them online. But the locals aren't laughing.

"We cannot leave [these signs] up just for the amusement of foreigners," one Beijing businesswoman told the Journal.

A few years ago, when "all your base are belong to us" was the catchphrase of the moment, I wrote a column about such off-kilter translations. I can understand why they're funny, I said, when they produce a pun or an off-color joke: "The lift is being fixed -- we regret that you will be unbearable," or "Special cocktails for ladies with nuts."

It's not so obvious, though, why we're amused when the mistake is not a joke but a near miss -- when a non-native speaker says "I have a new for you" or "I like to go naked-foot." Are we feeling superior, or are we enjoying a small revelation about language, as we do when a toddler says "Where doggy go?" or "I haved it"?

There's no reason, after all, not to call one news item "a new" or use a regular past tense for "have"; we just don't. And when someone (accidentally) reveals that we could, it makes us smile. Do psycholinguists know why? And if so, could they please share the answer?

Posted by Jan Freeman at 05:01 PM

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