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Q: What is the stupidist sign you have seen in English in China
I was in a Starbucks the other day and they actually had a bilingual sign saying not to squat on the toilets seat for your safety. Like a non Chinese reading/ English reading person would need this advice. Hysterical!!!
Want a lot of face, but too cheap to hire someone who knows both language and culture well
Robk:
I can only assume the second sign refers to while at a Heavy Metal concert.
Metallica says "Be responsible, carefully bang head!"
"No drugs, no guns and no nukes." - On the sign of a club in Xian
OH SHIT, how am I suppose to party without my nukes! 
DrMonkey:
In case you carry one of these ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Munition
Robk:
"Drop it and run fast Johnny! REALLY FAST!"
Saddam would have been cleared to party there. The whole world knows he wasn't carrying... 
'Wain Entrance To Walmart' still out there in front of Walmart, Optics Valley, Wuhan.
Guangzhou metro in some stations has a few signs that say " no hanging, eating and pissing around" not sure if it is a double entendre or just a mistake or very literal.
The one in Beijing that asks not to drive around with your car on fire. Now that is classic!
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=silly+signs+beijing+car+fireworks&FO...
This isn't it exactly, but I can't find my photo of the real thing in BJ. Anybody else ever seen one like this? I seen near Forbidden City... small road by a canal.....
I've seen one regarding police in several hotels that says ''if something happens, do not panic and call the police''
I can't post the pic, sign on washroom, ''This WC is washing free, please leave off after pissing or shitting''
The "No Smoking" and "Don't Naked" signs at the gym, with shirtless sweaty smokers casually strolling by in front of them.
On the emergency glass breaking hammers in the Beijing metro it is written "Emergency for use"
I saw inside the shopping mall stating that :` Wet floor! Please slip!``
"No entry on peace time" in a Beijing airport....which means Emergency Exit.
Racist Park in Beijing, I think it means a theme park to hail multi-nationality policy of China
Above each urinal in the Chengdu airport's men's room is a sign that says in English and Chinese: Please aim carefully
I really don´t like this kind of jokes about it, at least you should be a little bit thankful that they try to do it. And I really don´t understand either that native english speakers attitude that everyone out of their english speaking countries should speak their language. If you still haven´t realized, 70% of the word population doesn´t speak english and doesn´t need to do it. Moreover, if we consider mother languages, which are really used in the everyday, Chinese is three times more spoken than english in the world. English is not even the 2nd most spoken language in the world in terms of mother languages, it is Spanish. In my country in airports besides the local language everything is translated to german, english, and french in order to make things easy for foreigners travelling. What do you do in your countries?. Only in english, if you are a part of the majority of the world who doesn´t speak english, "f**k you". You treat others as if it was a must in their own countries to learn english in order to make your life easier when you go out. Hundreds of thousands of chinese speakers travelling everyday and you don´t even write a hanzi for them in the airports, but you expect they do for you, and expect they do it perfect. I hope that China continues to grow and that nationalism increases, so let´s see till what day they want to write in english for you, let you make these big laughs about their mistakes, and they start to write everything only in Chinese, the same as you do in your countries. Maybe you don´t even dare to write in other languages to avoid all the laughs we would do about it too. At least should appreciate they even try, something you don`t, instead of writing these posts, and make even books about the most hilarious "Chinglish" mistakes. I really hate how some english speakers look like some kind of Homer Simpson that never has gone out of Iowa, sitting on the sofa drinking beer and eating shit and wondering every time that he watchs the news about another countries " but why don´t they speak english?".
1st. I am not chinese
2nd. I am not a native english speaker so don´t try to tell me how bad my english is or try to correct me, because I am not interested on that. I just learnt it to pass an exam and never need to use it seriously again. Anyway if the world goes in the direction that it seems to go (thanks mr obama), it will be you english native speakers who will have to consider seriously to start to study another languages. Enjoy your years of glory.
Hotwater:
Great rant! And your English is very good.....have you ever thought to taking up teaching or sign-writing?
But to be serious, you make some very good points.
Shining_brow:
Oh, btw... as for your statistics, while English isn't the largest L1 in the world, it IS the largest L2! (well, you could argue for Putonghua and all....)... anywhere from 470 million, to over 1 billion 'speakers'. Spanish has about 550million - in total!
ambivalentmace:
i challenge you to find any sign in any language anywhere in america that is translated incorrectly, we have become so politically correct and so afraid to offend anybody that we have foot baths installed for muslim drivers of taxis in major cities and driver license books published in 20 languages.
america may be shit, but we do the shit right.
Mr_Sausage:
you are one seriously bitter Spaniard...
so many Spanish speaking countries yes...I think nearly all of them are boarding on poverty, and the motherland isn't exactly doing well i it?
so why should we learn Spanish?
EnriqueM:
Where have you read in my post that i want you to study spanish?
EnriqueM:
To Mr_Sausage
Some speaking spanish countries are in poverty, yes, and the motherland I don´t know because I don´t live there.
The only thing that I know is that this year thousands of americans have renounced their nationality. I only know that renouncing american nationality before was free, then obama government made you pay 450 US dollars. Now it is almost 3000 US dollars. And because of the alarm they are starting to consider a fee of 10000 US dollars for everyone who wanted to leave the country. That makes impossible to middle-class components to leave. (who real pay taxes).
A country which blocks their citizens when they wanna scape...This remembers me about some countries in East Europe 30 years ago... What we can see is that the USA, "The Land of the Free (lol)" , that Police State, is gonna be the next Soviet Union.
Maybe the wall that the government builds along the border with Mexico is not a wall to avoid south american inmigrants to get into the USA. Probably is built only to make you americans very difficult to leave the country in the future. The new Berlin Wall. Enjoy.
Maybe in some speaking spanish countries some people live in poverty, but they are free to leave whenever they want. (another thing is if they are welcome where they go).
EnriqueM:
The less important thing in my post was if English is the 3rd language, the 1st, or the 987th, it was just a call for some humility. It is true that at the start of the 21 century English is the used language in business or science. Before were French or others, and in the future, if Arab countries or Russia become a real economic superpower and rule the world economy in the level that USA has done in last years, maybe we will have to start to get used to do business in Arab or Russian, that is normal, each time got its lingua franca. Yes, if you count people who studied English as a 2nd language there may be 1 billion people who can understand English and 6 billions who don´t. Anyway many of those people who speak English in business can not speak good English in other areas of life. It is true that we in Europe must pass an exam in English, but at the end of the story millions of Europeans what they got is knowing how to say “You are very pretty” and “please a bottle of beer”. That is not to know a language. However for many native speakers anyone who can say “one,two, three” is an English speaker, but this is not the question. It is a matter of attitude. Maybe I generalized too much. Usually British living in another countries in Europe are more open to learn the local language. The problem is that kind of Americans usually coming from the deep America, with a level of general culture medium-low, and who would not be able to point USA in the map, that believe from tv that they live in the best country of the world, and the rest of the world belongs to them. .These people are shocked when they go out the country for first time and watch with horror that other people can communicate in other languages than theirs.. Those are the people that go to the supermarket in China and at the moment to pay in the cashier they directly ”shot” in English, assuming that any Chinese man or woman in China must speak English because “I am here and I am american citizen”. They don’t even ask first ”can you speak some English?”. As if in China, or Mexico, or France…there was a legal must to speak English to them. If the poor girl in the cashier does not understand English, poor girl, in her country they look at her as if she was an animal that just come from the forest. If it comes that the girl can speak some English, they get inflated as a balloon, full of pride. Not only that, even when they have what they want, some people who speak English to them, and translated signals… they do a big laugh about it “how stupid they are”. This is the same people who got outraged because muslim and mexican immigrants in America “don´t want to integrate in our society”. Great… How would it be if everytime that a chinese go to USA expects that everyone spoke to him in Chinese? What if he expects that all the signals there are translated to Chinese?...What if there was a web in USA called www.eAmericacities.com where all the Chinese expats in USA start a post whose title is “ The most stupidist sign that you have seen in Chinese in America” (something like this post in reverse)…where they mock every time that somebody writes the stroke of a hanzi wrong. What if Chineses when they are in America expected that everyone there got a “Chinese name”… “Hello, my name is Kelly Smith, but my Chinese name is Xiaoliang”… Ridiculous?... Well, they may do it. They are more. The problem is that in the Chinese mind we white people with clear hair and eyes are all American or English. They don´t know about French, Poles, Russians, Austrians…After many years in China I have never felt some hate to the foreigners till this year. I have heard three times “ I study English to get a good job, but I hate English, what we must do is make China big”. Almost the same as in Germany, after so many years treating them as the losers of the World War II, if you go to an small shop lately and speak English is not strange that they answer you “ English for England”. I hope that someday in China they stop to translate signals to English. First, they will not hear this kind of laughs anymore, and second, English native speakers will feel as lost as chineses do in JFK airport.
^^^calm down buddy, most of the laughing about Chinglish/Engrish etc. is good-natured. It has a funny and kind of charming sound to it. Agreed though that it would be dick-ish to make fun of it, just like it was dick-ish for that BJ rapper to make fun of the way westerns make tonal mistakes. And English is a blessed language. Get over it!
"Carefully slip" or "Be careful, slip down" or "Easy to slip, take care" 
Very common but always hilarious.
@EnriqueM - some of the points you make are very true! (and, as Hotwater said, your English is pretty good - far far better than most of us and our L2's).
However....
English currently the 'world' language - for business, medicine, science, computing, aviation. It used to be Spanish, and French, and Portuguese, and Latin, and Greek... and in other parts of the world, it was other languages. IN the 21st century, it's English. This is a fact. And, as you yourself pointed out, you studied English... Most Europeans have to study English in school, as do many other countries' peoples... so, if you want the signs to be short, then English is the obvious language to use (now... in the past, it would have been French, or Spanish, or Latin, or....).
As for what languages are used where, you may be surprised by some countries. In Australia, in the tourist areas, we do have multi-lingual signs... although admittedly, in the highest proportion of tourist languages - so usually Japanese, Korean and Chinese! (that's where the money is! The Europeans who go there tend to be backpackers - not the wealthier people willing to spend money!)
As for the Chinglish we laugh at... well, we laugh at Spanglish too. And Frenlish, and Japlish. The main issue really is - with the number of people learning English, why are there so many SIMPLE mistakes being made??
And - biggest issue of all - people are getting PAID to make those signs!!! I was in Harbin, and there was a massive 3 story sign on a department store - with bad English... the amount of money that would have gone into that sign was worth way more than what that sign got in its 'English'.... similarly, there's a new housing/shopping complex near here - again with bad English... if they don't bother to put in the effort to get the language correct, then how much faith can I have in the building quality?? That's not about 'language' - it's about effort!
(and yes, I'm quite happy for people to laugh at my language mistakes 
)
I can't give you an example of a sign, but this morning I saw a fourteen year old girl wearing a T-shirt which said, "Keep calm and fuck a British boys [sic]."
She would have had no idea what it meant.
On a toilet door in a shanghai bus station it says cryptically, "stool beware pay attention"
while i agree that english speakers should not expect all signs to be also in english, if you are going to translate something, you should at least get it right, if not for courtesy, then for 'face'.
Chinglish, while amusing, like any incorrectly translated language in a public place, shows contempt for the foreigners reading it:
"We are so modern and international we even use foreign languages, but we don't care enough to get it right because we don't care about foreigners - it just looks good."
I once worked in a company that, amongst other things, was responsible for translating public notices and information, tourist information etc into many foreign languages.
Hours would be spent checking and rechecking the translations, by native speakers, to ensure they were linguistically and grammatically correct for any non-English speaker.
we have all seem Chinese children wearing inappropriate writing on clothes - and laughed no doubt - but when it was explained to the parents, they would react with embarrassment. It is like the 'cool' American (or whoever) who gets a tattoo in Chinese or Japanese only to be told later it did not have the meaning they thought.
Guangzhou: The grass is most beautiful to looking, care to it. Take reading, Dog not pissing and shit the grass. And the Children.
HOTEL THING CONFLUENCE: A sign on the front of a large warehouse, I assume selling hotel supplies
The less important thing in my post was if English is the 3rd language, the 1st, or the 987th, it was just a call for some humility. It is true that at the start of the 21 century English is the used language in business or science. Before were French or others, and in the future, if Arab countries or Russia become a real economic superpower and rule the world economy in the level that USA has done in last years, maybe we will have to start to get used to do business in Arab or Russian, that is normal, each time got its lingua franca. Yes, if you count people who studied English as a 2nd language there may be 1 billion people who can understand English and 6 billions who don´t. Anyway many of those people who speak English in business can not speak good English in other areas of life. It is true that we in Europe must pass an exam in English, but at the end of the story millions of Europeans what they got is knowing how to say “You are very pretty” and “please a bottle of beer”. That is not to know a language. However for many native speakers anyone who can say “one,two, three” is an English speaker, but this is not the question.
It is a matter of attitude. Maybe I generalized too much. Usually British living in another countries in Europe are more open to learn the local language. The problem is that kind of Americans usually coming from the deep America, with a level of general culture medium-low, and who would not be able to point USA in the map, that believe from tv that they live in the best country of the world, and the rest of the world belongs to them. .These people are shocked when they go out the country for first time and watch with horror that other people can communicate in other languages than theirs.. Those are the people that go to the supermarket in China and at the moment to pay in the cashier they directly ”shot” in English, assuming that any Chinese man or woman in China must speak English because “I am here and I am american citizen”. They don’t even ask first ”can you speak some English?”. As if in China, or Mexico, or France…there was a legal must to speak English to them. If the poor girl in the cashier does not understand English, poor girl, in her country they look at her as if she was an animal that just come from the forest. If it comes that the girl can speak some English, they get inflated as a balloon, full of pride. Not only that, even when they have what they want, some people who speak English to them, and translated signals… they do a big laugh about it “how stupid they are”.
This is the same people who got outraged because muslim and mexican immigrants in America “don´t want to integrate in our society”. Great…
How would it be if everytime that a chinese go to USA expects that everyone spoke to him in Chinese? What if he expects that all the signals there are translated to Chinese?...What if there was a web in USA called www.eAmericacities.com where all the Chinese expats in USA start a post whose title is “ The most stupidist sign that you have seen in Chinese in America” (something like this post in reverse)…where they mock every time that somebody writes the stroke of a hanzi wrong.
What if Chineses when they are in America expected that everyone there got a “Chinese name”… “Hello, my name is Kelly Smith, but my Chinese name is Xiaoliang”…
Ridiculous?... Well, they may do it. They are more.
The problem is that in the Chinese mind we white people with clear hair and eyes are all American or English. They don´t know about French, Poles, Russians, Austrians…After many years in China I have never felt some hate to the foreigners till this year. I have heard three times “ I study English to get a good job, but I hate English, what we must do is make China big”.
Almost the same as in Germany, after so many years treating them as the losers of the World War II, if you go to an small shop lately and speak English is not strange that they answer you “ English for England”.
I hope that someday in China they stop to translate signals to English. First, they will not hear this kind of laughs anymore, and second, English native speakers will feel as lost as chineses do in JFK airport.
xinyuren:
You seem to have a huge chip on your shoulder. I get it. You resent that this world is English / Western-centric. But your points are incongruent with this topic.
First, Chinese students begin learning English at middle school and many even sooner. We should reasonably expect a certain level of proficiency. Nobody is expecting bi-lingual signs everywhere, but where there are such signs, they should be accurate. Why? Because it's a sign of professionalism. A people with self respect and respect for others will try to deliver good results. These obvious errors on public signs show a slovenly attitude and lack of care. As someone already mentioned, if you choose to do something, at least do it right. You seem to have a lot of disdain for the English speaking world. This is your problem and has nothing to do with the topic of discussion. We are finding humor with bad English we see every day in China. If the Chinese poked fun at my bad use of their language, I would take it in stride. It's only natural. But then again, I haven't been studying Chinese for 7 to 10 years of my life.
