Here is a new rule for the city’s aspiring translators: if you have more than three unrelated nouns in a row with nothing connecting them, it might be Chinglish.But the culprit here is far simpler than official-speak: no, here another translator decided to shelve common sense and whip out his Xinhua Character Dictionary. The result? Goods Ladder Mouth.
Goods Ladder Mouth sounds like a Todd McFarlane Christmas nightmare where a ladder comes out of the darkness, terminating in a man-sized deformed mouth that spits out gift-wrapped boxes full of zombies into an orphanage of babies. Crippled babies.
The mind reels.
The disaster began with the first character: huo. This very versatile character can mean currency, goods or anything to do with either. But given a huochuan is a freight ship and a huoche is a freight train and a huoji is a freight airplane, I would bet this has something to do with the word “freight.imilarly, a ti is just something that helps you go up or down. A tizi may be a ladder, but I am going to go out on a limb and guess this is closer to a dianti, or elevator: I make this wild assumption because the picture is of an elevator.
The last character kou is another one with a dozen meanings, but in this case it is just an enclave, which should be obvious to even the least meticulous observer given how the wall juts in.
Dropping the obvious, the sign would be better rendered as “Freight Elevator.t is a shame that a Xidan shopping center spent good money to have this nonsense cast in metal and backlit with neon before asking an English speaker whether it made any sense.
