Just remember, when this becomes the newest and best addition to the Olympics, you heard it here first: it looks like the Beijing 2008 Olympics are going to introduce tickling as an Olympic sport. I think we can expect the average age of Olympians to drop a little, for as we all know, the younger folk are the champions of tickling.
Oops, it looks like they mispelled "tickling" as "tickeling" too!
Ok, seriously. I saw this a couple days ago and just could not resist stealing this shot. And no, this has nothing to do with tickling, but is just a "cross your Ts" problem. It should be "ticketing". But the question remains, can I buy tickets for the tickling event?
China, along with many other non-native English speaking nations, has a wide variety of "issues" with using English in public. This is not a cheap shot at China and its bad English...not at all. Rather, it is a question: can they not just ask?
I once asked a friend of mine doing language-related training for businesses here in China if he was thinking of offering services to fix these kinds of problems, to which he answered a very quick "no". Why? Chinese businesses are seldomly willing to pay. They do not care enough to pay for correction. They would rather grab their accountant's sister's classmate who is studying English in college to translate for them.
But this particular case is not bad English as much as it is bad English alphabet recognition. The person who typed this did not need to know the English word for 'ticketing', but just needed to type it in correctly. They saw a 'T' and typed an 'L'. If everybody in China has mandatory English in school for who knows how many years on end, can they not recognize the English alphabet in fairly standard fonts? This scares me. Really.
I have to wonder when they are going to have the guts to dish out a few bucks to have quality and trustworthy translation services.
I have always wondered why they don't just ask any one of the thousands of foreigners studying in China. But I think there is another factor, and it has to do with a fundamental difference between Chinese and western languages. Chinese people, as a rule, do not spell words.
They draw pictures, which represent meaning. I have seen as many Pinyin spelling mistakes in their own language as I have English errors. I think that often they just don't realize that a phonetically-based writing system has words with standard ways to spell them.
Posted by: Dave | 16 Jun 2007 at 12:28
There might be something to that, I don't know. I would guess it is more face, though. They are hesitant to lose face by asking. I have never quite understood why then they are willing to expose their laziness to the world.
Posted by: Cooper Strange | 16 Jun 2007 at 14:14
I agree, it must be face. But them not wanting to loose face is resulting in them loosing face. They just don't know it / want to admit it.
Posted by: Chris | 19 Jun 2007 at 12:18
Absolutely. Somehow, though, that kind of situation does not make them lose face. I do not quite understand myself.
Posted by: Cooper Strange | 19 Jun 2007 at 20:30