Goodbye, Anus Hospital
Photo courtesy of eychao
I’m sure the Beijing landscape has changed vastly since I left there in December, but the New York Times confirms at least one transformation that saddens me deeply. Around the corner from my first apartment in Beijing, on Dongdaqiao Lu near Chaoyangmenwai Dajie, stands a hospital that specializes in proctology. Their sign used to read, “Dongda Hospital for Anus and Intestine Disease.” Apparently, that is not the case any longer, as Beijing strives to put on its best face for the Olympics.
Mr. Tool said he spent his weekends visiting different businesses as if he were a detective in a linguistic vice squad. “I go in and I say the Olympics are coming and this sign is wrong,” Mr. Tool said. He then sends an e-mail message with a correct translation or has a printout delivered.
He is writing a book on the subject, and no wonder: regular blunders include typos on menus in which the ‘b’ in crab becomes a ‘p.’ Some translations are trickier, like describing pullet, which is a hen less than a year old but appears on some menus as Sexually Inexperienced Chicken. Mr. Tool said one prominent sign had become a regular photo op for foreigners: the Dongda Anus Hospital.
Mr. Tool intervened. It is now the Dongda Proctology Hospital. Score another gold medal for Beijing’s self-improvement campaign.
11 Comments »
Alexandra,
Students from our third year Chinese language class at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois are creating enhanced podcasts about the culture and travel of many of China’s provinces. We found your beautiful photos on flickr and we are hoping you would allow the students the privilege of displaying your photos (citing your source) in conjunction with their audio podcasts. You can view the student narratives and the description of our project via the New Trier link that I provided. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about the enhanced podcasts. We are hoping to offer these podcasts to other students around the world. Our project should be complete before the end of this school year.
We hope to hear from you.
Charlene Entman
Podcasting Project Coordinator and Web Developer for New Trier High School.
Hi Charlene,
I would love it if the students used my photos from China for their projects. It would be fun to see the finished work–could you send me a link when they are done?
Ali
(I hope you come back and see this…you didn’t leave an email and I didn’t see an address on the site you linked to!)
Ali,
The student enhanced Podcasts are just about complete. Kessel Laoshi and I used your photos as part of our introduction to the student projects. Thank you very much for allowing us to use your photographs. Within the next few days we will link the projects from the Wiki web site.
http://chinaprovinces.pbwiki.com/
Charlene
Podcasting Project Coordinator
Hi, I am an editor from a bilingual magazine called Bilingual Time. Do you like write some article for us? Please contact me at candy@bilingualtime.com
Hi there!
I was perusing your site and noticed that you have a link to us on your site — thanks for that – and this is just a quick note to let you know that we’ve changed our URL – from the original www.thatsbj.com to the new www.thebeijinger.com.
Pop by and you’ll notice the content remains the same, as always, including:
– Beijing’s most active free classifieds;
– An oft-used (and occasionally abused!) bbs
– Our extensive Beijing directory and events listings
– The online archive of articles from that’s Beijing magazine
– A large collection of Beijing-related links
– An online gallery of Beijing party and event photos
– And our new web-only content posted daily in our tbjblog
Thanks again for linking to us and please send us a message any time if you have any questions!
Victoria
thebeijinger Web Editor
Absolutely wonderful blog, whole treasure of information on China. tks so much for sharing.
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April 26, 2007 @ 1:35 pm
now thats a 4/20 post if i’ve ever seen one. lets see more of that.