16 September 2010

same hue

It is really too easy to find signs in China that are poorly translated; and this will be the last post I will do on that topic.

Some mis-translations can be revealing about the speech of the sign-writer, such as the use of 'sport' instead of 'spot' in my previous post. And others can indicate a dependence on looking things up in a dictionary without checking with someone who has reasonable competence in English, such as my earlier post about 'Disperses the channel'. But this one near a pagoda in the Jinshan Park in Zhenjiang has me baffled:While there is nothing too much wrong with the English, the Chinese actually says "river sky one glance", the idea being that you can get a panoramic view from the top of the pagoda, taking in everything in a single glance. So where does 'hue' come from?

It seems that the sign writer in this case does not understand Chinese, and has mistaken the character 览 to mean 'colour' ('hue') rather than the true meaning 'to glance'. Very strange!