SPORTS AND HOBBITS!
Here is a website which I recommend you all to visit: it’s http:// www.engrish.com. if you want to have a good laugh. You can find numerous pictures of signs in weird, funny English which is good enough to tickle you. At times, these sentences are so ridiculously ill-formed that you can hardly decode the message. At times, the message may seem clear but the choice of lexical items used don’t seem to be appropriate. One example that caught my attention was a sign taken from a library saying sports and hobbits!
I burst into a fit of laughter upon seeing this because hobbits conjures up images of short men/women living merrily in tiny cottages during the medieval period. Also, JRR Tolkien and his famous Lord Of The Rings immediately comes to mind when Hobbits is mentioned.
Of course, it is outrageous that a library should have a sign like that especially when it is obvious that the error was merely an orthographic one. The take –away from this is that, even a simple word, when spelled wrongly CAN ALTER THE intended meaning and at times, generate meaningless or bizarre sentences.
Another example of an orthographic error was spotted on a banner outside a food stall. On the banner was a picture of our favourite hash brown, but guess what was written on the sign? HARSH BROWN! Oops, I have lost my appetite to eat HARSH BROWN because I only eat Hash Brown.
Another example:
I think this was a sign taken from china because it was in Chinese. The purpose of the sign was to warn parents to prevent their child from going too near the lake to avoid falling into the water. However, on the sign , it was written as : Take the child, fall into water carefully!. Again, we observe that this is a result of a direct translation from Chinese! Dai hao hai zi, xiao xin luo shui!
After having come across all these signs coming from Japan and China, I realized that in non-Anglo countries, their standard of English is pretty low. But we cannot blame them since English isn’t their native language. Yet, English being the only language in the world to achieve this status as a World Language and a lingua franca where people of different cultural and social background communicate, one cannot avoid using English during the course of their life. That explains why in most countries, we always find natives of the country conversing in English with a foreigner, unless a common ground has been established (such as being capable to speak the native’s language). In tourism, we observe that in most tourism websites, there will always be an English version , if the native language of the country is not English. Likewise, even in cities like Tokyo, Paris, Berlin etc English can be seen on signboards in public places like airports, train stations etc. Therefore, it is crucial that signs must written in proper English where sentences are grammatical and meaningful. The examples we have seen above are very bad ones and should be taken down immediately. Honestly, I feel that these countries could do a better job by hiring skilled translators to do the translations. It is indeed a torture and a pain to read meaningless signs which leads one to nowhere.