Nothing
equals the roundabout way some Chinese manufacturers tout their
products or signs in English. In my family it is the source of many
jokes, usually after the kids get a token present that was mass
produced in China and sells at the local equivalent of a dollar shop.
To get a good laugh, we don't have to travel to China (although I wish
we did) or even access some of the Internet's best compilations of
Chinglish. Check out Engrish's Chinglish compilation and the daily mail's
Chinglish
is funny because it uses the most roundabout and awkward way to say
something simple, something that can be easily expressed with an idiom
(like don't walk on the grass, or mind the gap). In fact, we all
Chinglish when we don't know the tools we use or the best methods to
approach a problem.My kids got a present yesterday. It says "While
using, the thumb is light to push the button and then can illuminate".
No, this is not a 25 cent device that makes your thumb illuminate, just
like an alien. It is a ballpoint pen my sons got yesterday, with a
small LED at the tip of its lid. When you press the button, the light
turns on. A non Chinglish translation would read: "press the button to
activate the light". At a cursory glance, it's a novelty item with
little value. But on a deeper level, it's a great lesson about culture
and language.
First, there is the
confidence-inspiring "assemble high can the battery electric power hold
out for long time and can continue to give out light". The product
itself is called "small electric light circle bead pen" – apparently
they noticed that the tip of a ball-point pen is bead sized. More
interestingly the company calls itself "zhongsheng culture thing".Why
is this so funny? First of all, the mis-use of language always is. It
is also funny since you know that the person who wrote this was dead
serious. It's not so funny when you discover you are also Chinglishing
something.
In the business
intelligence world, you see a whole lot of the same activity, but it is
not as funny and the people making the mistakes are dead serious too.
We're launching Prism for AdWords this week. What I'd like to argue is
that most people using the current tools on the market and the
interfaces that come with AdWords are all practitioners of Chinglish –
a lot of the stuff is lost in translation and a lot of hard work is
done for nothing. For instance, look at the problem of filtering
keywords by performance. All the solutions are manual and laborious,
customized for AdWords. Like Chinglish: awkward, long and misguided.
Look at the way Business intelligence can solve this – cross analysis
of any measure over any dimension, with multiple elements cross
analyzed at once. Compare. And that is SiSense's message to the world –
use common, tested, proven, robust business intelligence solutions to
manage everything. Don't practice Chinglish instead.
Roni
