This entertaining sign was posted by the Guiyang Passenger Railway Branch and was recently discovered by the Chengdu Business News.
Although the English translation of the first line, “The expensive sun multiplies by a duty a police to pay a brigade,” is completely incomprehensible, there’s no mystery as to how it occurred: it’s basically a character-by-character translation of 贵阳乘警支队:
The expensive () sun () multiplies () by a duty (??) a police () to pay () a brigade ().
What it should be: Guiyang (贵阳) Rail Police (乘警) Detachment (支队). Whoever reviewed the translation didn’t even notice that it should have contained the name of the city.
The second line is more confusing. It’s actually a hotline for reporting police behavior (警风) and road conditions (路风), where , “breeze,” also carries the meaning “style” or “behavior” (as in the jargon term 党风, “working style of the party”). So that explains the first three words of the translation.
But the next few words make no sense at all. How did “the hurl” and “tell” come out of , “to supervise”? Even when broken into individual characters, the meaning’s just not there. Fortunately, the final word, , “telephone,” is rendered correctly.
Chengdu Business News spoke to an expert who said that even a middle school student wouldn’t have come up with such an absurd translation. He speculated that the translator must have used the most primitive version of Chinese-English translation software available.
Commenters posting on Netease had a field day with the article. The current top comment offers other creative translations for Chinese cities (there are many more here:
北京——North Capital
武汉——Fight Man
青岛——Green Island
四川——Four Mountains
宝鸡——Expensive Chicken
天津——Sky Ferry
海口——Sea Mouth
长沙——Long Sand
上海——Above Sea
长春——Long Spring
兰州——Blue State
The Guiyang Rail Passenger Branch, which falls under the authority of the Chengdu Railway Bureau, has promised to fix the sign as soon as possible.
- Chengdu Business News via Netease (Chinese): Guiyang Rail Passenger Branch has English errors galore