[Say what?]: when English gets lost in the translation from Chinese, the result is a funny hybrid known as 'Chinglish.' So why aren't Chinese officials laughing?

• Author: Jacobs, Andrew
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

For English speakers whose Chinese isn't up to speed, daily life in China offers a confusing array of choices. Banks have machines for "cash withdrawing" and "cash recycling." Restaurant menus offer dishes like "monolithic tree mushroom stem squid." And for those who eat too much, extra-large clothing is available in "fatso" or "lard bucket" sizes.

Visitors to China get a smile out of such mangled words and phrases, which are known as "Chinglish." But Chinese officials aren't so amused: For them, the fractured English is a national embarrassment.

"The purpose of signage is to be useful, not to be amusing," says Zhao Huimin, director general of Beijing's Foreign Affairs Office, who has been leading the fight for linguistic standardization.

With China's emergence as a global economic power, more Chinese students are learning English, which has long been the international language of business. And as China's major cities strive to become more user-friendly for English-speaking visitors, the government has mounted a campaign to make English signs grammatically correct and easier to understand.

In Shanghai, China's most populous city, the Commission for the Management of Language Use worked for two years to correct English-language signs and menus in time for the "Better City, Better Life" Expo 2010, which opened in April and has drawn more than 60 million visitors.

With an army of 600 volunteers and a committee of fluent English speakers, the commission replaced more than 10,000 public signs, rewrote historical plaques, and helped hundreds of restaurants revamp their English menus.

The campaign was modeled partly on Beijing's herculean effort to clean up English signage for the 2008 Summer Olympics, which led to the correction of 400,000 street signs, 1,300 restaurant menus, and such gaffes as Racist Park, a cultural attraction that has since been renamed Minorities Park.

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But though government officials may be proud of their effort to eliminate mangled English, fans of Chinglish hate to see it go.

Oliver Lutz Radtke, a former German radio reporter in China who may well be the world's foremost authority on Chinglish, says that China should embrace it as a dynamic, living language.

"If you standardize all these signs, you not only take away the little giggle you get while strolling in the park but you lose a window into the Chinese mind," says Radtke, who is pursuing a doctoral degree in Chinglish at the University of...