Readers may already be familiar with Engrish.com, a website originally dedicated to Japanese English howlers, but which has recently broadened out to other countries, most notably China. Chinese English is usually called Chinglish, and there are some real classics at the website, such as signs by a pond which say "Take the child. Fall into water carefully." Also a sign from a Taiwanese cafe that instructs you to "Please Keep chair on position & Keep table cleaned after dying. Thanks for your corporation."
I recently encountered a new website called The Chinglish Files. It lacks the volume and regular updates of Engrish.com, but it nevertheless has some belly-laugh material. It also has the advantage of being maintained by someone who reads Chinese (at least a little), which can sometimes help explain the signs. The first sign that really caught my attention was the one above a toilet that instructs you to "mang out after sh*t." The original photo comes from Namisan's photostream on Flickr.
The website is a little cumbersome since you have to dig through the archives to get to some of the best material, but it's worth it. For example, in April 2008 you find a restaurant sign showing that you can buy "Fried special wikipedia" for 98 yuan, or "Eggs Fries wikipedia" for 68 yuan. A little further digging into the archives produced another that had me laughing uncontrollably for about 5 minutes. January 2008 has the entry that isn't Chinglish at all ... it's a sign entirely in Chinese, and at first I wasn't willing to believe the English translation. It certainly appeared to say what the translation said ... but I was not willing to trust my own translation skills. It seems that it really does say (my translation, not the website's): "If you treasure the environment, you will live for 100 years. If you throw trash everywhere, your sons will die and you won't have any daughters." How's THAT for a "don't litter" sign!?!? It amused me so much, I've created my own English language version.
addendum: The Chinglish Files does acknowledge the original source of this last picture, the blog East West South North, but the link works in such a way that seems to me to be just plain bad manners. You click on it and it shows you the original page, but you never actually leave The Chinglish Files and are not provided with the original link to go to EWSN on your own. I had to google the blog and do an internal search to come up with the original link.
