During the holiday, I went for a short trip to China to visit families and friends. While walking around in the gritty city streets, I've noticed a lot of signs with English translations. This really baffled me as certain cities in China would not attract tourists at all. However nearly everywhere I see bilingual signs, from food, road and warning signs. But the sad news is that 95% percent of the signs are wrongly translated.
This got me to research deeper on how and why the Chinese government did a pretty bad job at this. I've found out that Beijing began turning its attention to multilingual signs as part of the 'reforem and opening up' in the 80s, especially in preparation for the 1990 Asian games. And due to the unprofessional job they did then, Beijing overhauled the signs and even created a website where residents can upload and point out areas that needed attention and change.
However, it was only Beijing which got the makeover, but smaller cities and villages are still left with the 1990s laughable signs. China did a great job on transforming the signs as its a major tourist attraction and multilingual signs are definitely welcomed by the thousands who comes and visit.
More info at:
http://www.danwei.org/trends_and_buzz/beijing_cleans_up_its_sign_tra.php
Looking back at the UK, where all signs are only in English. Should the government establish a multilingual sign system for the upcoming Olympic games in 2012? in French? Spanish? Mandarin?
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