Thursday, August 8, 2013

Wrong signs, with photos - Suzhou, China

Signs in China are often translated in English. I am not entirely sure about it but I suspect that there might be some law or government guideline behind this. Normally road signs and information boards in public places are correctly translated. When it comes to the private sector though any sign can suddenly become some sort of comic strip, cheering you up when you are in a bad mood or simply a bit bored. Sometimes the mistakes are so funny that one might think they came out of a lousy Google translation or that out of a long list of dictionary entries somebody carelessly picked the first one, regardless of whether it made sense or not.
In order to give you an idea of the quantity of mistakes over the total number of signs I'm only publishing the ones I've spotted in the Suzhou residential compound where I've been staying for a few weeks.
Hundreds of copies put up all over the compound, all of them with the same typo
This is my favorite, it beats them all