Is Engrish Funny for the Chinese?

Do you know how to use a “fire distinguisher”? Would like to try a drink “without conservatives” (“Hillary’s favorite”)? Have you seen the “But Man” movie?

I must admit that the Engrish.com website has been my guilty pleasure for a couple of years now. The website is an endless and glorious collection of photos showing misspelled writing in English: public signs, menus, unintentionally funny T-shirts. A part of the material is total mumbo-jumbo that comes from using Google Translate-like software, a part comes from human translation errors. There are also spelling or grammatical mistakes, like the “L”-“R” difficulty which many Koreans and Japanese face when using English, due to the phonetic peculiarities of their own languages. But sometimes the mistakes can create new meanings and become unintentional puns. “Violators will be fine” or “Room Chick Out” (a check-out sign from a hotel in South India) are good examples of such errors.

A huge part of the fun are the comments added by the author of the website. A recently uploaded photo shows a back wall of a market that says: “Flesh Meat” (isn’t that the same thing twice?). “Straight from the fleezer” adds the comment below the picture. But for me the comments are at their best when they treat the original mistake as a pun and elaborate on it in their own creative way. An advertisement that misspelled “Special Taste” turning it into “Special Testes” appeared with the comment: “Are you nuts?” The expression “French Lamp Chop” found in a menu was posted with “For a light meal…” below it.  The original website was started before 2000, so a comprehensive list of such delightful language games would be quite long.

However, since I mentioned this was a “guilty pleasure,” the “pleasure” section is behind us and it is now time for the “guilt” party. The “Flesh Meat” sign came from Japan, the “French Lamp Chop” from China, the “Special Testes” advert from Korea, and so on. The examples of “Engrish” – I will use it here in a broad sense of funny mistakes in English – come from all over Asia, from India through Cambodia and Vietnam to China. But photographs sent in from mainland China and Japan seem to be numerically dominant. Of course, it has a lot to do with who follows the website and decides to take time to send the photos. You can surely find plenty of examples of “Engrish” in, say, India and possibly a country like South Korea could be easily as often represented on the Engrish.com website as Japan.

Still, the whole enterprise with its current geographic reach – despite my admiration for its sense of humor – can for certain minds be just a step away from the path leading to racism and linguistic domination.

Is “Engrish” to be found only Asia? No, non-British Europeans also sometimes make hilarious mistakes while writing in English – and some of them do end up on Engrish.com –  though it is rather obvious that such errors are nowadays much less common than in China. And don’t the British and the Americans make mistakes while writing in their own language? Of course they do – pretty much like everyone else when using one’s own language, and, to be fair, the Internet is full of such examples.

The creator of Engrish.com has faced this criticism and put up a disclaimer to defend the site:

Among the thousands of emails received by Engrish.com, there have been about one or two that have questioned the political correctness of the site. Obviously everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but I think that it is important to state here that Engrish.com was produced for entertainment purposes only – not to offend a particular race, people, or society. Anyone who has lived in Japan for an extended amount of time will tell you that Japanese corporations come up with some interesting and oftentimes funny English. The webmaster of this site lived in Japan for over 10 years and loves the people and culture. If anyone can point out anything in the site that is blatantly racist or otherwise uncool (and I agree with you), I will happily change the content of the site.

Thank you for your understanding!

I believe that these words are sincere. And, as stated above, the administrator of the website is not responsible for the fact that people choose to submit materials mostly from Asian countries.

But it still does make me think of certain implications that we would be wise to avoid. The British colonial empire spread the English language throughout the globe and now developing nations need to use it. While some of their inhabitants struggle to master the language and make inevitable mistakes on their way, some of the people in the Euro-Atlantic world are having a good laugh while watching these efforts. If I put it this way, the exercise in pointing out mistakes can become an element of postcolonial linguistic domination. The Europeans and Americans may no longer dominate the world economically and politically as much as they used to, but as long as everybody has to speak a European language like English it can be used as yet another yardstick of superiority: they make more mistakes than we do, we have our English, they have theirs.

To me, a few disclaimers and unofficial rules are needed to avoid going down this road. Firstly, as mentioned above, Europeans also make mistakes when using English, even the British and Americans do this. While the disproportions in the number of errors should be rather obvious, let us not create statistics and compare countries in that way (and Engrish.com does not do this). And if we are alright with laughing at the Chinese or Japanese cases, then we must be equally ready to laugh at those that come from Europe. I am Polish and English is not my mother tongue. I do make a lot of mistakes while using English so I do know it is not possible to completely avoid them.

Secondly, the tables are already slowly turning and a reverse situation with Chinese, if it takes place, should be equally acceptable if we want to be fair. Even in Europe – not to speak of other continents – one witnesses a rising wave of Chinese language learning. So if we find Engrish is funny, we should be ready to accept that the Chinese may one day have websites that will display loads of examples of European and American struggles with the Chinese language.

Thirdly, for certain terms there is already more than one version of English and English words have also become a part of the vocabulary of many other languages. Surely, Engrish as a collection of errors is not a language, but a name given to a certain trend. But on the other hand mistakes quite often become norms in a longer run.

Languages constantly change and exchange words with each other. Loanwords are never pronounced in exactly the same way in the new language as they used to in the source language. The results can sometimes sound as mistakes, hilarious puns or vulgar expressions for the users of the source language. But these words do not solely belong to the source language, they become a part of another language which has its own grammatical and phonetic rules. No matter how funny their pronunciation may sound or their spelling may look like in the source language, they are now words belonging to the language in their own right. It is possible that this may happen with some of the “Engrish mistakes.” To somebody rigidly attached to British English, American English may sound and look barbaric and awkward (shouldn’t a spelling like ‘nite’ be considered a punishable offence?). The French can feel the same way about a host of their words that had landed in England. We can go back in time like this for millennia.

But it doesn’t mean we cannot enjoy a good laugh. In a nutshell, the whole point is not to link linguistic humor to national or racial differences, and to be ready to be laughed at in a similar way.

And I would really like to possess a “fire distinguisher.