Plain Chinglish

Humorous, bizarre, and sometimes just plain wrong translations of Chinese into English, from the author of Chinglish and More Chinglish. Plain Chinglish offers an insightful look at misuses of the English language in Chinese street signs, products, and advertising. Menu translations such as “Chicken scratched in front of a peice of noodles,” safety notices such as “Prohibition against door,” and public education signs such as “Labor glorious, Lazy shamefull” will make readers laugh out loud. A long-standing favorite of English speaking tourists and visitors, you can enjoy 120+ brand-new examples of this unique cultural heritage from the comfort of your own home. Oliver Lutz Radtke is the author of Chinglish: Found in Translation and More Chinglish: Speaking in Tongues. As a writer, journalist, and project manager at a private German foundation, Oliver strives for better understanding between China, Europe, and the US. You will often find him on a plane to Beijing and his discoveries at www.chinglishmuseum.com.

Chinglish offers a humorous and insightful look at misuses of the English language in Chinese street signs, products, and advertising. A long-standing favorite of English speaking tourists and visitors, Chinglish is now quickly becoming a culture relic: in preparation for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the Chinese government is determined to wipe out incorrect English usage.

As heard on Radio 4's Woman's Hour and BBC Breakfast TV Winner of the YA Diverse Book Award, Bristol Teen Book Award, and 'Simply the Book' Coventry Inspiration Book Award Shortlisted for the Indie Book Award Nominated for the Carnegie Medal It is difficult trying to talk in our family cos: a) Grandparents don’t speak English at all b) Mum hardly speaks any English c) Me, Bonny and Simon hardly speak Chinese d) Dad speaks Chinese and good English – but doesn’t like talking In other words, we all have to cobble together tiny bits of English and Chinese into a rubbish new language I call 'Chinglish'. It is very awkward. Jo Kwan is a teenager growing up in 1980s Coventry with her annoying little sister, too-cool older brother, a series of very unlucky pets and utterly bonkers parents. But unlike the other kids at her new school or her posh cousins, Jo lives above her parents' Chinese takeaway. And things can be tough – whether it's unruly customers or the snotty popular girls who bully Jo for being different. Even when she does find a BFF who actually likes Jo for herself, she still has to contend with her erratic dad's behaviour. All Jo dreams of is breaking free and forging a career as an artist. Told in diary entries and doodles, Jo's brilliantly funny observations about life, family and char siu make for a searingly honest portrayal of life on the other side of the takeaway counter.

How do English-speaking novelists and filmmakers tell stories of China from a Chinese perspective? How do they keep up appearances of pseudo-Sino immanence while ventriloquizing solely in the English language? Anglo writers and their readers join in this century-old game of impersonating and dubbing Chinese. Throughout this wish fulfillment, writers lean on grammatical and conceptual frameworks of their mother tongue to represent an alien land and its yellowface aliens. Off-white or yellow-ish characters and their foreign-sounding speech are thus performed in Anglo-American fiction and visual culture; both yellowface and Chinglish are of, for, by the (white) people. Off-White interrogates seminal Anglo-American fiction and film on off-white bodies and voices. It commences with one Nobel laureate, Pearl Buck, and ends with another, Kazuo Ishiguro, almost a century later. The trajectory in between illustrates that the detective and mystery genres continue unabated their stock yellowface characters, who exude a magnetic field so powerful as to pull in Japanese anime. This universal drive to fashion a foil is ingrained in any will to power, so much so that even millennial China creates an “off-yellow,” darker-hued Orient in Huallywood films to silhouette its global ascent.

Based on the commonly held assumption that we now live in a world that is ‘on the move’, with growing opportunities for both real and virtual travel and the blurring of boundaries between previously defined places, societies and cultures, the theme of this book is firmly grounded in the interdisciplinary field of ‘Mobilities’. ‘Mobilities’ deals with the movement of people, objects, capital, information, ideas and cultures on varying scales, and across a variety of borders, from the local to the national to the global. It includes all forms of travel from forced migration for economic or political reasons, to leisure travel and tourism, to virtual travel via the myriad of electronic channels now available to much of the world’s population. Underpinning the choice of theme is a desire to consider the important role of languages and intercultural communication in travel and border crossings; an area which has tended to remain in the background of Mobilities research. The chapters included in this volume represent unique interdisciplinary understandings of the dual concepts of mobile language and border crossings, from crossings in ‘virtual life’ and ‘real life’, to crossings in literature and translation, and finally to crossings in the ‘semioscape’ of tourist guides and tourism signs. This book was originally published as a special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication.

As China experiences tremendous economic and social transformation in the reform years, language use in China has also undergone remarkable changes in the past couple decades: the national obsession with learning the global English, which becomes both a resource for modernization and a source of contention; the expanding use of local languages and dialects in mass media, where standard Mandarin is promoted and legally prescribed as the principal language; the emergence of the Internet language that has become a creative source for constructing a distinct youth identity; the Cantonese writing movement that challenges the hegemony of the Chinese writing system, which is traditionally based on northern Mandarin, to name a few. The nine papers collected in this volume examine recent trends in language use in mainland China, and the associated social, economic, political, and cultural manifestations. Drawing on their backgrounds and expertise in sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and cultural studies, the authors offer interdisciplinary, insightful, and critical analysis of linguistic struggles and linguistic politics in contemporary China. As such, the carefully presented details of emerging language use in this book will be of value to scholars interested in language and culture in contemporary China. It may be used as a supplementary text for students in Chinese (socio-)linguistics, Chinese language, Chinese cultural studies, Chinese anthropology, Chinese sociology, and Chinese studies in general. Contents:Synchronic Variation or Diachronic Change: A Sociolinguistic Study of Chinese Internet Language (Liwei Gao)The Metaphorical World of Chinese Online Entertainment News (Chong Han)The Use of Chinese Dialects on the Internet: Youth Language and Local Youth Identity in Urban China (Jin Liu)“My Turf, I Decide”: Linguistic Circulation in the Emergence of a Chinese Youth Culture (Qing Zhang and Chen-Chun E)Chinese Via English: A Case Study of “Lettered-Words” As a Way of Integration into Global Communication (Ksenia Kozha)Learning English to Promote Chinese — A Study of Li Yang's Crazy English (Amber R Woodward)More than Errors and Embarrassment: New Approaches to Chinglish (Oliver Radtke)Writing Cantonese as Everyday Lifestyle in Guangzhou (Canton City) (Jing Yan)Negotiating Linguistic Identities Under Globalization: Language Use in Contemporary China (Jin Liu and Hongyin Tao) Readership: Undergraduate and graduate students, academics, professionals and general readers interested in new trends in language use in China, internet language, youth language, Chinese society and Chinese culture. Keywords:Globalization;Chinese;Language Use;Language and Culture;Sociolinguistics;Language Change;Internet Language;New Media;EmergenceKey Features:The first volume of its kind to present a scholarly, panoramic view of recent trends in language use in ChinaMost updated and socio-culturally informed study on many interesting topics including the emerging Chinese Internet language, youth language, resurgence of local dialects, Chinglish, codemixing, Li Yang's Crazy English, and moreThe interdisciplinary nature of this volume, as the contributors are from a variety of disciplines such as sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and cultural studies