EXPO Engrish
Posted by Filed under Culture
Recently I attended this year’s EXPO in Shanghai, which was truly as impressive as it was crowded. Tens of thousands of people were milling around the various nations’ pavilions, and queues for the more popular pavilions (Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, UK etc.) were 3-4 hours or more. However, it gave me a great choice to enjoy some of the Engrish dotted around the huge purpose-built EXPO area.
As far as I could see, the vast majority of the visitors were Chinese, and almost everything was signposted in Chinese and English. As bad as some of the signs were, I shouldn’t really complain, and when it came to the literature and the individual pavilions of English-speaking countries, everything was perfect. And indeed, compared to a lot of Engrish that I’ve seen in China, even these mistranslations were pretty comprehensible. However, it just seems that they might have done with a couple more proofreaders for the more general things… here are a couple of photos!
