Understanding Chinglish: A new play tries to bridge the language gap

Mandarin has arrived on the Broadway stage thanks to a new play called Chinglish, which explores the communication gap between the English-speaking world and China. It is a bilingual play, written in a mix of English and Mandarin, surely a first in the history of Broadway, BBC News reports.

Written by the playwright David Henry Hwang, Chinglish is a comedy with a ripped-from-the-headlines theme. It tells the story of a struggling American businessman who finds himself in a provincial city in China, trying to win a contract to make signs for public buildings.

The play explores the language barrier that separates the businessman from his Chinese counterparts who can make or break the deal.

Hwang, a Chinese-American who does not speak Chinese, felt inspired to write the play after his own business trips to China.

"I've been going to China a fair amount over the last five or six years, mostly because China has become interested in Broadway musicals and I happen to be the only nominally Chinese who's ever written a Broadway show," says Hwang, referring to his play M Butterfly, which won him a Tony Award in 1988.

In China he could not help but notice the "absurdly translated signs" of Chinese into English - otherwise known as Chinglish.

Naively literal, the signs garble English into hilariously strange phrases: one, outside a bathroom for disabled people read as "Deformed Man's Toilet".

Other examples were equally baffling:

• False Alarm! became The Siren Lies!
• Slippery When Wet! was Be Mindful of the Juicy Surfaces!
• Don't Feed the Birds! now read The Fowl Cannot Eat!

But the miscommunication between cultures runs deeper than words, says Mr Hwang.

"Chinglish is about attempts to communicate across cultures and the barriers that separate us, and the most superficial of those is language.

"But then sometimes even if you're speaking the words literally you may as well be speaking a different language because some of the underlying cultural assumptions are so different."

For full version see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15471753