Does bad English have too much license?

A recent microblog post by a Canadian who pointed out wrong translations on Chinese driving licenses has triggered intense online debate and brought the problems of mistranslation into the spotlight once again.

David Klinck, a Canadian teacher in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, said on his microblog on April 7 and 9 that he noticed a few translation errors on the license he received last month, where "date of birth" is translated as "birthday" and "gender" is translated as "M&F."

"That makes people with a Chinese driving license a hermaphrodite," he joked, with picture of his license as proof, explaining that "M&F" means both male and female while the correct translation should be "M/F" (male or female) or simply "Gender" or "Sex."

"Everybody has a birthday each year but there's only one 'birth date' or 'date of birth,'" said Klinck in the entry.

"I'd like to turn back into a male in six years when I renew my license," said Klinck, who has been living in China for seven years.

"It's good to put English translations on official documentation, but wrong and funny translations can affect the government's image," he told the Global Times yesterday. Some road and public venue signs are funnier, he said, with strange translations or simply pinyin under the Chinese names, which does not help foreigners.

The same mistakes can be found in all Chinese driving licenses issued by public security authorities. The Ministry of Public Security could not be reached for comment yesterday.

English translations used in Beijing's public venues, government authorities and on restaurant menus have seen substantial improvement in recent years, especially after the Beijing Olympic Games in the summer of 2008, said an employee with the Beijing Speaks Foreign Languages Office under the municipal government.

"We may do some research and include official documentation translations in our work in the future, if necessary," said the anonymous employee. She told the Global Times currently many government departments in Beijing, including the transportation authorities, have their own foreign language experts to supervise any translation work they might have.

Many English translations in China are technically correct, but they can be very clumsy, said David Moser, an American TV host in China who taught at Beijing Foreign Studies University and worked as translator at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"Some 99 percent of official documents are first translated by Chinese people and then polished by foreigners. The English reads correctly but it's not idiomatic," Moser said.

"I don't expect the English translation to be perfect in China," he said. It'll be better if the government can hire some full-time foreign nationals to do corrections and polishing, he said, "but I don't think they're willing to pay, since a Chinese who speaks a foreign language is always cheaper than a foreign national."