Apps Have Taken the Fun and Colour Out of English Mistranslations in China
Navigating Beijing after 16 years away, there is one question that I am in constant internal dialogue with: How the hell did I function the first-time round? In 2002, I had landed in China, a Mandarin-virgin, in what was a translator app-less, search engine-less, GPS-less world, and yet, had somehow, fumblingly flourished. It boggles the mind to recall that whenever I didn’t know a word, I’d had to wait until my next meeting with my Chinese teacher to find out what it meant.
Dictionaries had been of little help. It took weeks to learn how to look up a Chinese one, given that these were organised by radicals – component parts of characters that offer clues to function or meaning. Dear reader, if you are befuddled by this explanation, do know that mastering dictionary-reading for a Chinese language novice had entailed befuddlement of a wholly higher order.
I had to get people to write down addresses in Chinese characters on scraps of paper, which then functioned as flimsy rafts on the stormy seas of the alien landscape in which I tossed about, illiterate and disoriented. I used to memorise sentences like – Wo yao mai huar (I want to buy flowers) before setting off to buy flowers – and repeat them mantra-like to passersby, until someone was able to crack the cipher of my toneless utterings and point me in the right direction.
I remember having my chickens and airports mixed up. I’d once asked a taxi driver to take me to the airport. When the word elicited only a puzzled scratching of the head, I’d held my arms out wide, raising them up and down gently in imitation of a plane taking off. He’d seemed to understand and motioned me to take a seat. A few minutes later we pulled up in front of a KFC, and with a victorious flourish the driver turned around and flapped his arms back at me.
By comparison, China 2025 is linguistically antiseptic. Translation apps mean that you can take a photo of any written words to have their meaning revealed a button-touch later. People can speak into your phone in Chinese, and it speaks back to you in English. Wechat – Chinese Whatsapp – has an automatic translation function.
It is more convenient, this tech-abetted world. Less intimidating, less opaque. And yet, stripped of the mistakes and mistranslations of unmediated, real-world interactions, it rebuffs deep attention. You can get through the day half-alert, multi-tasking. The all synapses-firing, full focus state of being, that lacking language once induced is blunted.
Without glibness, your ego is displaced – sent packing to the margins. You become the least interesting person in any conversation. A valuable thing to be, because it is from the periphery that you then watch, infer, and learn – filling in the gaps with little epiphanies. Idiomatic perplexion invites effortful meaning-making. The smart phone is the antithesis of effort. It helps to understand the language but can obstruct the understanding of experience.
Translation tech has also somewhat “fixed” the Chinglish that was so much part of the countryscape in the oughties. Restaurant menus used to feature dishes billed as, “f*ck the exploded duck.” The blame, as ever, when it came to Chinese-English (mis)translations belonged to homonyms. The character pronounced “gan” - 干 - can mean both "dry" and "to do." But the latter is also a colloquialism for “f*ck." In Beijing, I used to find numerous iterations of this particular mistranslation. At a local supermarket, the dry food isle was labeled “assorted f*ck.” My all-time favourite was a spicy stir fry of green vegetables and dried tofu described in English as, “benumbed hot vegetables fries f*ck silk."
And even when technically correct, there was a revelatory directness to the English signs of that era. Shorn of euphemistic nuance the translations became searingly accurate. In one hospital I visited there was a door sign that read, “vagina examination room.” At a busy traffic intersection, another hospital was fronted by a billboard proclaiming it to be the “Dongda Hospital for Anus Disease.” (The sign was eventually ‘corrected’ to “Dongda Hospital of Proctology” in 2007). A theme park dedicated to China's ethnic minorities welcomed visitors with a hoarding that read "Racist Park."
Image of a restaurant menu. Photo arranged by author.
In this, my second China innings, the translations are usually less startling. AI-powered interpretation is ubiquitous and functional. But even now there is, on occasion, magic. I order a flat white from a neighbourhood coffee shop every morning. When I open the app to track delivery progress, it reads: “Third party knight is rushing to the merchant.” The character for ‘delivery guy’ is 骑. It would best be translated in English as “rider,” but because it contains the radical of a horse within it 马, the app reads it as ‘knight.’ So much more epic than “delivery guy is on the way to the restaurant.”
To indicate the delivery status, a coffee delivery app in China reads: “Third-party knights rush to the merchant.” Photo arranged by author.
In fact, words that are rendered quotidian in a native tongue, are often remade remarkable in translation. I visited the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall of China last weekend. There was a sign advising climbers that they were about to encounter a “careful stair.” Another haiku-like one read: The road is slippery after the rain, please look out.
Further on, would-be cable car users were told that “smoking, frolicking and swinging the car,” was “strictly prohibited.” And that the “drunk and delirious” were forbidden from riding. Ditto persons “having a dangerous trend.” Being taxonomically exempt from all prohibited categories, I was lucky enough to ride the cable car up to the Wall for some magnificent views. How did one say “magnificent views” in Chinese? I didn’t know. My hand began to creep into my sling bag to extricate my phone, so I could find out. But I caught myself just in time. The answer could wait until I next met my Chinese teacher.
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