The "Great Taipei Shoes Store" may not know it yet, but I've just renamed it the "Dataibei Shoe Store." I also think foreigners in Changzhou, the Chinese city where I live, will find "No Unaccompanied Children" much clearer than "Take Care of the Teenager."

Daniel Bruno Davis "No Talls in Disorder," a garbled translation intended to say "No Street Vendors." See more photos "Chinglish," the bizarre but often entertaining mixture of Chinese and English that's ubiquitous in T-shirts, storefronts and street signs here, was recently targeted for elimination by the Chinese government. It was Beijing's latest attempt to modernize China by making it as bland as possible.

This order somehow filtered through the serpentine levels of the Chinese bureaucracy to the translation department of the Jiangsu Teacher's University of Technology, a school that produces mostly middle-school and high-school teachers. I teach English and history there, which makes me, in Chinglish, a "foreign expert," a phrase that itself needs a new translation. I'm not really an expert in much of anything besides being foreign.

The translation department compiled a number of pictures of suspect signs from all over this city of three million, about 100 miles west of Shanghai, and took its best crack at fixing the more egregious errors. At some point, the translators decided they needed help from the foreign experts to complete the national directive.

So I and another foreigner teacher were invited to consult. I think the translation department figured we would simply give their work some finishing touches, but we realized we needed to start from scratch. A number of their translations were better than the indecipherable original, but they still were mostly literal translations, even when they made no sense in English.