Making an Impact

Jinghong, China

I've always wondered how many of the English translations in China get written. Yesterday, I had the unique chance to be part of that process.
It was quite surprising actually. And tiring considering that I haven't done a day's work for a while. Hehe.
It all started innocently when I mentioned to the girl at the reception of my guesthouse here that their sign at the roadside and at the door (the guesthouse is in a backyard) are not the same. One reads "Dai Building Inn", the other "Dai Garden Building". According to the Lonely Planet (another time that it proved less than useful) I was looking for a guesthouse named the former but couldn't find it because the sign at the road was different (and hung way to high and out of sight). So I mentioned the signs were different. I was taken aback by the question: "What should it say then?" Well, considering the Chinese “傣家花苑小楼” (literally: Dai Family Flower Garden Small Building) I said that the name next to the road was the correct translation. Oh, she reacted, but the other sign was also told us by a foreigner. Well, not every foreigner that may speak some Chinese can also speak proper English. I was even more surprised that she and her husband (?) immediately went about changing the erroneous text on the inner sign. They kept coming back to me asking how to spread out the English words and where to put which word. It turned out that it worked out too long for their sign, so me and my Australian room mate started thinking about how to say it. In the end, we came up with "Dai Garden Lodge" which seems to fit the meaning and the sign and also, we agreed, sounds nice. They eagerly wrote everything down and disappeared.
Later, my room mate wanted to buy a boat ticket (it is possible to take a boat from here along the Mekong River to Thailand). When the staff at the ticket counter realised I spoke Chinese and English they quickly conjured up a notice sign about procedures at their port, written in Chinese on one side and English on the other. Could we have a look at the English side, please, and check it for mistakes. We looked. We looked again. The heading was something like "The beard to the tourist to know". We both do have beards but what did that have to do with anything. It went on in this style. Chinglish. I'm sorry to say that we couldn't help but laugh. Most of it was almost incomprehensible. The girls looked at us embarrassed. Could we try to help them work out a better translation? It looked like a lot of work. Now? Here? Err ... we were about to wind our way out of the situation when fate came to their aid. It started pouring down. A literal rain storm. Hmm... might as well do a good deed. I do hate to see Chinese at the butt end of international jokes because of bad English translations. "And they say that a hero could save us..." We dug into the forest of grammatical anomalies and unknown Chinese characters and only emerged hours later. We wiped the sweat off our foreheads. Now the heading says "Notice to the Traveler". I won't guarantee that any of it will hold up legally in English but now it's understandable. It's actually English. We were rewarded with a huge dinner and Dai performance. And some seriously strong local firewater.
When we got back to the guesthouse late in the evening the sign on the inner door read "Welcome to Dai Garden Lodge".
Talk about making an impact.