Taiwanglish

PANCHIAO, TAIPEI COUNTY, TAIWAN (MPI) — I am in debt to Bruce Fleming for alerting me to the site www.engrish.com, which hosts some of the funniest incidences of attempted English on the Web.

Shortly after arriving in Taiwan I started observing the local version of Engrish, which I will call Taiwanglish, initially on signs:

Most of the above I had noticed during my long bus rides to work. Later, when I started riding the MRT more often, I was happy to not be disappointed by the MRT’s Engrish signage. At the base of an MRT escalator warning the elderly about the speed of escalators:

And in an MRT bathroom, near the hot-air hand dryer:

Perhaps a little more surprising was the Taiwanglish I’ve seen on signage in the bathrooms of several of the English schools I have taught in! Sticker on inside of bathroom stall in bushiban school:

I managed to capture a couple of them digitally before my digi-cam’s untimely squat-toilet-related demise:

A recurring venue for prime-quality Taiwanglish, however, is of course, Tee-shirts worn by young Taiwanese girls:

In collegiate-looking letters, for a fictional university:

And the words printed around the inner rim of the faux-university seal:

And on a sticker at the bottom of my new stainless steel waste-paper basket:

But by far, the venue for Taiwanglish that has most vigorously grabbed my imagination is the canvas of dirty, beat-up, ever-present motor scooters that populate every Taiwan street. Almost every scooter has a slogan, in very questionable English, either on its front faring, its side haunch, or both, ranging from the mundane to the cutesy to the modest to the entirely undecipherable...

People in Taiwan are generally pretty smart, however, and English proficiency among the populace is growing, so it was only a matter of time before distributors got hip to the joke and began to put things right. Most newer models have either a succinct, grammatical, idiomatic English slogan or none at all. The most egregiously poor translations  —  and thus, the funniest ones  —  are getting harder and harder to find as newer models proliferate.

Lately I’ve found new fascination in hunting for new bizarre slogans among the literally hundreds of parked scooters that I can easily observe on my daily commute. It is a mathematical certainty that upon venturing into any given Taiwanese neighborhood one will see more scooters (parked and mobile) than humans.

Hunting today for scooter slogans completely transformed my walk to and from work,the only thing that mattered was to find even weirder wording...