Shanghai English rules revised

Telegraph:

Shanghai does not want to lose face over the mistranslations and mistakes when thousands of visitors arrive for the World Expo next year.

Teams of student volunteers have been assembled to scour the city for Chinglish and a website will shortly be launched to collect complaints, according to the city's Language Work Committee.

The news will dismay many English-speaking residents, who have developed a fondness for the city's quirky signs.

At the Pearl Tower, one of Shanghai's most famous attractions, a sign forbids "ragamuffin, drunken people and psychotic" from entering.

Further instructions include: "Prohibit carrying animals and the articles which disturb common sanitation (including the peculiar smell of effluvium)" and a ban on "dangerous germs, pests and other baleful biology".

Meanwhile, on the city's subway system, signs such as: "If you take the phone on your waistband, as if to send money to the thief" or "If you are stolen, call the police at once" are likely to vanish forever.

Although public signs can be easily altered, there remains some doubt over whether officials can contain the spread of Chinglish among private businesses. Some stores boast that they are "Cellular telephone is monopolied" while a problem using a computer translation tool led one restaurant to proclaim its name as "Translate server error".

...

Some of it is pretty creative and will be missed, but I think we can count on continued server errors for some time to come. Hughesnet seems to have them daily.