Chinglish

This will be the last of my series of postings trying to make some sense of China, but I had to write something, as a linguist, about Chinglish - the series of deeply bizarre English translations from Chinese, hilarious, senseless or both, that you see everywhere on signs, product packaging, T-shirts, posters, and everything else in China. There as many people learning English in China as there are native speakers in the United States and Britain put together, and open-minded linguists argue that the language they're developing to speak to each other, while it might not be intelligible to us, is still a valid development in the language's mongrel history, and it would be as regressive to complain about it as it was for the Academie Francaise to try to ban the word sandwich. Even so, much English teaching in China is very poor, taught by teachers who speak poor English themselves and conducted out of ancient textbooks to pass exams, and based on reading classic texts, so you often find students who can't order a cup of coffee in English reading Shakespeare. This leads to howlers everywhere, and there are a few theories as to why the people writing them don't just find a better English speaker, if they're not sure:
1) Hierarchical Chinese boardroom culture - signs may be commissioned by bureaucrats who speak no English, and whoever is given the job doesn't want to defy their boss by saying they might not be up to it, so they make a stab with Google translate,
2) National pride- they don't want to admit defeat by getting foreign translators in,
3) Most English words - or random combinations of Roman letters - that you see on products are never intended to be read by a native speaker, just make the product look glamourous, so it doesn't matter what they say
4) They're translating literally, and they really think the result is English
5) They don't care.
I think it's probably a combination of 3,4 and 5 myself. Here are a few examples.