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Idioms present a challenge when attempting to master any language, as Jeannie in Beijing demonstrates:
I work as a business English trainer and a few months ago one of my students asked me to recommend a good chicken tail wine.
Following several moments of confusion, I realised that he was referring to cocktails, but had adopted a very literal translation. This is one of my all time favourite examples of Chinglish – the term complacent expats (who usually speak little or no Chinese funnily enough) use to refer to entertaining mistranslations from Chinese to English.
My top 3 examples:
3. (On a toilet door near the Olympic Stadium) ‘Deformed man toilet’
2. (Written on the front of a school text book) ‘Today’s real simple like you, you and you no longer’
1. (In a hospital waiting room, pointing the way to gynaecology) ‘Cunt Department’.
Readers, do please share in the comments your favourite foreign malapropisms. Although I suppose Jeannie’s examples aren’t so much malapropisms as the very essence of bluntness.
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