I discovered a word I never knew existed: Zhonglish. It is the English language’s ‘gift’ to Chinese, and it can be considered the companion to Chinglish the Chinese language’s gift to English. Its origin is in the Chinese word for China, which in pinyin is Zhongguo. Zhonglish seems to be a much less ostentatious offering, and there are probably reasons why there are fewer visible garbled attempts at communication from the Anglo-Saxon world to the Chinese world than there are in the opposite direction. I have therefore been asking my exchange partners about Zhonglish but have not got many concrete replies yet. I am not sure if this is because examples of it are more often the ephemeral live attempts at speaking rather than the more permanent commercial signs and product names that give testament to Chinglish, or whether this silence is because my partners are simply being polite. I honestly cannot tell at this point.
I read a fascinating article on Chinglish which explains in detail how computer translation software can mess things up so badly. The spectacularly rude ‘fuck the empress’ example, cited from a Chinese website detailing paint application techniques, is priceless.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2443
Maybe this is just another one of those things I will pass through but need to first get out of my system. I am, after all, involved in language in a serious way right now so it is practically inevitable I should arrive here. That said, Chinglish does go quite deep into the concepts underpinning the two languages and it also goes into international trade and migration, so it can touch things beyond the obviously comic examples that abound. What is clear however is that if I am to do anything with this stuff it will be tricky to find a way that doesn’t come over as having an easy laugh at other people’s expense. I will have to be very careful to balance it well and present it in a way that avoids arrogance. Hmmm.
