Close the book on Chinglish
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After lavish opening remarks and rounds of enthusiastic applause, it was almost time to take the stage. Luckily, I wasn't the first speaker. I remained seated, fidgeting, as the speaker before me went up.
As soon as he put up his first slide, my jitters dissipated. A new sentiment - a familiar, mild malaise - came on instead. There, splashed on the big screen, was an announcement of exciting new tools: "Unplug Multimedia Device", brought to you by the people who clearly didn't consult a native English speaker when shortening the word "dictionary" to create their company name.
Behind me, a few North American teachers exchanged confused whispers about what "unplug" means. Others muffled their chuckles at the company's unfortunate name. ("Unplug," judging by the Chinese text on the slide, should've been "cordless").
I was slightly mortified. Why hadn't this company asked someone to proofread their materials? They're going up against an audience of bilingual language teachers, for Pete's sake!
As the presentation went on, a few more blunders caught my eye. There was a "digital fescue", which sounded like something an angry robot would do to you (and not at all like a digital pointer that a teacher could use on an interactive board when instructing). There were "sentence patents", which had me scratching my head, until I realized these intellectual-property-rights-respecting sentences were actually supposed to be "sentence patterns".
Scattered throughout the presentation were nonsensical, but grammatically correct, English phrases. "Fescue", by the way, is "a small pointer (as a stick) used to point out letters to children learning to read", according to Merriam-Webster. The presenter had done part of the work - he found the precise English words to relay his Chinese meaning - but he hadn't gone the whole way. The word "fescue" probably hasn't been in popular usage for the last 400 years.
