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Words in Chinese are sometimes read from right to left. This particular sign has spelt "Toilets" from right to left. |
BEIJING: For seven years, David Tool has patrolled Beijing's streets hunting for embarrassing signboards, inspecting menus and teaching residents English to help the city prepare for the Olympics.
The 66-year-old former US Army colonel played such a central role in helping Beijing raise its English standards that officials honoured him by making Tool the first foreign torch bearer when the Olympic flame entered the capital.
Tool is best known as head of Beijing's "English Police" who retranslated many of the city's notoriously bad and sometimes very funny signs.
He helped rename a theme park dedicated to ethnic minorities previously known as "Racist Park." He also rechristened the Dongda Proctology Hospital, formerly the Dongda Anus Hospital.
But the work done by Tool and the Beijing Speaks Foreign Languages Committee, on which he is a volunteer consultant, received so much international publicity some Olympic visitors arrived with huge expectations.
"We were lead to believe they had been gearing up their English skills and they would widely be speaking it," said Lesley Wills, a 49-year-old nurse whose son is on the British archery team.
"We've been disappointed by how little they have."
The committee began an ambitious campaign in 2002 to get a third of the city speaking a foreign language by the Olympics.
And especially for the Games, volunteers of various levels are manning 700 information booths around the city, which are backed by a translation hotline.
Overall, Tool said, the campaign has been a success. But there are limits, not everyone's level is high. There is also a distinctly Chinese problem: so many people means even teaching a few million people English can be too few.
"You know we've got 14 million people here," Tool said of Beijing. "You're likely to run into a million of them before you find the five million who do speak some English."
Beijingers should be commended for their unprecedented efforts to learn a second language, the 66-year-old from South Carolina argued.
"Have Parisians ever tried to teach all cab drivers a second language? Did we do that in America, try to teach them Chinese or Spanish?" he said.
Tool, a professor at Beijing International Studies University, said he was moved to act during a Beijing Opera performance in 2001, where a group of foreigners laughed uproariously at poor subtitles while performers on stage were visibly confused.
In one caption, "auspicious cloud" became "auspicious clod".
"It woke me up to the fact the Olympics were coming and we had this problem," he said.
He wrote to China's Culture Ministry and volunteered to correct translations at museums and cultural sites before the Olympics.
They took him up on the offer, but suggested instead of museum displays, he could start with the subway and the road system, Tool said.
From there, he moved on to business signs, but there were so many poor translations that as the Olympics came closer, Tool's team chose to focus on the areas around Olympic venues. They then narrowed it further to situations where the mistranslations affected safety.
Tool also helped judge hundreds of televised English speaking competitions involving every layer of society from students to waiters to policemen.
At one point, Beijing officials discussed requiring cab drivers pass an English test to renew their licenses, but ultimately the need for taxis outweighed the need for good English.
Tool said sometimes he is accused of lacking a sense of humour because of his zeal in tackling awkward translations.
But he said he laughed plenty during his work, particularly while reviewing the menu of every major hotel in Beijing.
"'Hunan Flesh for a Short While', 'Incense of Furious Bullfrog' and 'Bean Segments Explode Large Intestine'," he said, rattling off specials that Olympic guests will never see.
Tool said he would often speak directly to shop keepers when he would find a badly worded sign, sometimes accompanied by local journalists.
At one restaurant near Beijing's Workers Stadium, he told the owner that a 20-metre-long sign was wrong.
"He jumped from table to table tearing the thing down," Tool said. "It wasn't just for the cameras. This is a common thing, they don't want to embarrass themselves and they want it all to be pretty for the Olympics."
- AFP/yb
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