Chinglish has life, please don't trample on it

BEIJING, April 15 -- Oliver Radtke believes Chinglish mistranslations may be fun, but are not to be made fun of.

More than that, they have become serious business for the German Sinologist, who believes the portmanteau adds spice to the alphabet soup that is English today.

"My message on Chinglish is: It should be conserved.

"It shouldn't be treated as a cheap joke for foreign tourists to laugh at but as a cultural treasure," said the 32-year-old multimedia designer, who frequently visited China for almost a decade before moving to Beijing in 2007.

"I'm trying to challenge the notion that there is only one type of standard English - the English that's spoken in America or in the British Isles - which is shortsighted, because Chinglish is already being used by millions of people to communicate with one another."

So, since 2005, the scholar has collected more than 5,000 specimens of "the wonderful results of an English dictionary meeting Chinese grammar" on his website www.chinglish.de and has published two books on the subject.

The website receives about 10,000 visitors a week, he said, and his first book, Chinglish: Found in Translation, has sold nearly 50,000 copies since it was published in September 2007 by Gibbs Smith Publishers. His new book, More Chinglish: Speaking in Tongues, hit the shelves this month and is available in Beijing at the Wangfujing Bookstore and The Bookworm.

"The two books are unique in that they go beyond the fun book you pick up at the airport in that they talk about this approach of conservation, the academic value of Chinglish, the creative combination of English and Chinese, and why we should keep it," Radtke said.

Patricia Schetelig, who works for the German Embassy in Beijing and regularly contributes to www.chinglish.de, said she appreciates Radtke's approach to Chinglish.

"What's important to me is that he's not making fun of the way things are translated," she said.

"There are other websites doing similar things, but they're making fun of Chinglish or saying it shouldn't be done this way."

Some of Radtke's favorite phrases include: "Welcome To Presence", "Wash after relief", "Little grass has life, please watch your step" and his first specimen, which sparked his interest in Chinglish in 2000 - "Don't forget to carry your thing".

Another darling is "STELIOT" - the mirror image of "toilets". Radtke said he loves this example because it came from the sign-maker's presumption that since Chinese characters were once written from right to left, English letters could be, too.