Have just come across this Chinglish term for being able to understand English but not produce it orally, according to Wikipedia translated from the Chinese expression ya ba ying yu, and simply liked this compound noun so much that I wanted to spread the expression around. I don’t think there’s such a nice term for it, but Mute [...]
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Geoff Pullum’s newspaper headline noun compound interpretation difficulty post earlier today reminded me of Japanese. Why? Because sometimes the Japanese love really long noun compounds. In fact, it may be that nothing strikes more ... Read Post
Chinese have a bit of a bad habit of translating things directly into English from the original Chinese. So instead of simply saying “Welcome to Beijing” we have “Beijing Welcome You”. It is often referred to as “Chinglish” and ofte... Read Post
In our numerous posts on Chinglish here at Language Log, we have shown how unintentional errors of translation from Chinese result in ludicrous or impenetrable English. In this post, I shall demonstrate how translations from Englis... Read Post