A floor sign in a police station in Hangzhou kindly reminds people to “wait outside a rice noodle.” The message is obviously a wrong English translation of “waiting out of the one-meter line”. However, probably some machine translation software has mistaken the Chinese character combination in its phrasal grouping session by mixing up “a rice noodle” and “one-meter line”, which are literally written in exactly the same characters, resulting in the wrong translation and uncommunicativeness.

A reader used to tellHangzhoufeel that he once saw a sign that was supposed to mean “entrance” and “exit” was written as “import” and “export”, whose Chinese characters are exactly the same but with different connotation meanings. “Insome circumstances, the wrongly made signs also work, but sometimes they could be misleading and don’t make sense.”

More bugs maybe found. In fact, as the city is getting more internationalized, people tend to add signs in multiple languages. These signs may go wrong due to the multiple procedures in making them.

Currently, Hangzhou Foreign Affairs Office and Hangzhoufeel are calling for the public to join the public signs error finding campaign to find out bad translations and other bugs on public signs as an effort on putting on a better appearance for the city.

When walking around the city, you may take photos of the confusing signs, mark their locations and send them to hangzhoufeel@126.com preferably with your suggestions on how to polish them. A certificate issued by Hangzhou Foreign Affairs Office will be given to you as the recognition of your contribution.