Sunday, November 10, 2013

We speak Engrish good!

No, the title on this post is not misspelled.

After a wonderful two-week break between semesters, school started up full swing again this week! While we were away, some of the Thai staff at our school apparently decided to create some posters to encourage students to use resources wisely. They had their posters translated into English, then proceeded to post them all around the school, without ever having the translation double-checked by a native speaker.

Thus, the foreign teachers at our school came back to work to see amazing sights such as this:


I hope the irony does not escape you. You see, a big draw for our school is that we have foreign teachers teaching in English, so the students who come here will learn English well. Putting up posters like this is quite an advertisement, don't you think? I, for one, had a really good laugh about all of this, though. Supposedly, the signs will be taken down, re-translated, re-printed, and replaced...but at the end of the first week back, they're still all hanging in various locations throughout the school. Then, of course, we add the irony of wasting resources and doing things inefficiently...which is what the signs are trying to teach us not to do!

Here are a few more of my favorites:

 This one can be seen above the garbage cans (dins?), of course.


 Unfortunately, the sinks in our bathrooms are automatic, so I have no power to carefully use every drop.


 Really not sure what the guard shortage is, but saving electricity will help it, I guess!


 Yeah...I don't get it either.


It's okay. I do teach my students what subject-verb agreement means. (Actually, compared to the others, this sign isn't really too bad)


And, of course - we apparently aren't supposed to be thinking too hard about these things!


For the record, despite some criticism sometimes, we really do love our school.
And we love Thailand.
And we love Engrish signs.

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