Why does China have so many embarrassingly bad English signs?

James Fallows, who had been in Beijing a great deal leading up to the Olympics, wonders why one finds so much bad English signage in China:

On the other hand, it truly is bizarre that so many organizations in China are willing to chisel English translations into stone, paint them on signs, print them on business cards, and expose them permanently to the world without making any effort to check whether they are right. I can't resist this example: when we lived in Shanghai, a local museum had a very evocative and politically daring exhibit about villages that were being drowned by the Three Gorges Dam. And on huge banners outside, in letters six feet high, it said: "Three Georges Exhibit." If they had shown the banners to anyone who actually spoke English....

Why does this happen? I wish I knew. In micro terms, it must come from rote reliance on dictionaries or translation software. For instance, the title of this post: the dictionary will tell us that 叔叔, shu shu, means an uncle. But of course it does not mean what "Uncle!" means in U.S. slang -- as any Chinese speaker would point out if you asked him to check out the title. (For those who don't know, "Uncle!" means, "I give up! You win!") In the larger sense, why so many people would so carelessly waste money and -- the real mystery, considering Chinese sensitivities -- so brazenly expose themselves to ridicule is a puzzle. Learning a language means being willing to make mistakes. That's different from presenting formal, error-filled material for outsiders to read.

I noticed this when I was there back in 1990. My pet theory as to why this is has to do with the Cultural Revolution (from the Wikipedia entry, of course):

Elsewhere, the 10 years of the Cultural Revolution also brought the education system to a virtual halt. The university entrance exams were cancelled during this period, not to be restored by Deng Xiaoping until 1977. Many intellectuals were sent to rural labor camps. Many survivors and observers suggest that almost anyone with skills over that of the average person was made the target of political "struggle" in some way. According to most Western observers as well as followers of Deng Xiaoping, this led to almost an entire generation of inadequately educated individuals. However, this varies depending on the region, and the measurement of literacy did not resurface until the 1980s.^[20] Some counties in the Zhanjiang district, for example, had illiteracy rates as high as 41% some 20 years after the revolution. The leaders denied any illiteracy problems from the start. This effect was amplified by the elimination of qualified teachers--many of the districts were forced to rely upon chosen students to re-educate the next generation.^[20]

This can't have been good for fostering good English translation: for an entire generation, knowing English was likely to get you sent to a re-education labor camp or worse. Maybe a careless attitude towards foreign translation took root during this time, and was never corrected. (Are the Chinese similarly careless with other languages, or is there propensity for humorous mis-translation confined to English?)

By the way, I wonder how good the translations of signs in the United States are? Oh wait, nothing here is translated into other languages. Well, I guess that's not entirely true. The San Francisco airport has a lot of Asian language signs, and of course there's the brouhaha about the increasing use of Spanish in American public signage and in public life in general. (I don't mind it; I rather wish I knew other languages better. My limited French barely qualifies as a second language). Somehow I doubt that this is an equivalent problem in the United States, but given that I can't read the translations I'm not in a position to judge.