I ONCE came across a notice near the graves of the terracotta warriors in Xian with the following message: "Please buy an ticket consciously before sightseeing. Neither scribbling nor climbing the Stone carvings. NO stepping onto the grass. NO picking flowers. If you find yourself to be swindled or extorted. Please contact the local security spot."
There are many examples of such oddly phrased announcements in China. In a park north of Beijing a sign advises visitors: "Give you all the wonderful views of the strange stone boundlessness of beautiful views of dreaming stone world city."
At the Great Wall at Mutianu, another curiously worded notice in English admonishes readers: "Follow the tourist orders conscientiously. Don't push or squeeze. Keep the environment and clean.[sic] Don't pollute it or litter garbage everywhere. Take good care of any tree or grass. Smoking and lighting is forbidden."
It added for good measure: "No fighting or rioting. No preaching feudalism or superstitious belief."
The Chinese have put up such notices all over the country on the assumption that English is the tongue of international tourism and that foreigners cannot read Chinese. Indeed until the Sino American Treaty of Wanghia in 1844, China's rulers made it a crime for outsiders to learn Chinese, such was the Imperial court's contempt for and fear of the foreign devils.
There is a good explanation for the erratic English usage. For three decades after the communist revolution in 1949 China was virtually closed to outsiders. Linguists were reviled and punished during the Cultural Revolution. Students of languages had almost no opportunity to meet native speakers who could edit the simplest translations. And even for the last 20 years of openness contact with foreigners has remained difficult and politically risky.
English teachers and students have therefore had to rely for half a century on out of date text books and inadequate English Chinese dictionaries. But as the open door policy brings English speaking visitors to China in even greater numbers and Chinese travel and study abroad in English speaking nations, the country's linguists have grown ill sophistication and now realise they have a big problem to tackle.
Last week loo professional translators from 24 provinces met in Xian to discuss the tourist lexicon. Delegates pointed out how a sign saying "Visitor Stop" might be taken by tourists to mean "Bus Stop" whereas it signifies "No Admittance". Also the Chinese word - "fandian" means both "hotel" and "restaurant". The translators resolved to upgrade all published tourist information.
More importantly the Chinese are taking steps to improve their English where it is a matter of life and death. Few Chinese air traffic controllers for example are proficient in English which is the international language of the skies. Beijing has set January 1st 1998 as the date when controllers and pilots speak English to one another in all international sectors.
At any given time 15 or so Chinese controllers can now be found doing eight week courses at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, in programmes sponsored by Delta, United Air Lines and Federal Express which have expended their routes into China.
In other respects China is ambivalent about the Queen's English, the official or joint official language of 75 countries throughout the world, which is on a global roll as the language of international tourism, air traffic, shipping, the Internet, computers, and airport bookstalls. Throughout Asia 350 million people speak English, and every major Asian city has an English language newspaper.
As far as China is concerned however there are two world languages, English and Mandarin Chinese.
To curb the arrogance of Anglo Saxon, the Chinese Foreign Ministry made a point last year of switching its press briefings for foreign correspondents from English to Chinese, pointing out that the US State Department conducts its briefings only in English.
Naturally the Chinese are insisting that after June 30th Mandarin joins English as the official language of Hong Kong, where the six million people speak a noisy and rich dialect of Cantonese. Here Mandarin is on the up and up. In the past year Mandarin courses have proliferated in the territory, which China takes back on July 1st, and about half of the 200 of Hong Kong's secondary schools currently teaching through English will switch to Chinese after Britain leaves.
And as a Chinese scholar noted, it is worth remembering that while westerners smile indulgently at the quaint English at tourist sites in China, Chinese language experts in Hong Kong have been amusing themselves for years by collecting the laughable grammatical mistakes made by British officials when translating official documents from English into Chinese.