By Cooper Strange

Just remember, when this becomes the newest and best addition to the Olympics, you heard it here first: it looks like the Beijing 2008 Olympics are going to introduce tickling as an Olympic sport. I think we can expect the average age of Olympians to drop a little, for as we all know, the younger folk are the champions of tickling.

Oops, it looks like they mispelled “tickling” as “tickeling” too!

Ok, seriously. I saw this a couple days ago and just could not resist stealing this shot. And no, this has nothing to do with tickling, but is just a “cross your Ts” problem. It should be “ticketing”. But the question remains, can I buy tickets for the tickling event?

China, along with many other non-native English speaking nations, has a wide variety of “issues” with using English in public. This is not a cheap shot at China and its bad English…not at all. Rather, it is a question: can they not just ask?

I once asked a friend of mine doing language-related training for businesses here in China if he was thinking of offering services to fix these kinds of problems, to which he answered a very quick “no”. Why? Chinese businesses are seldomly willing to pay. They do not care enough to pay for correction. They would rather grab their accountant’s sister’s classmate who is studying English in college to translate for them.

But this particular case is not bad English as much as it is bad English alphabet recognition. The person who typed this did not need to know the English word for ‘ticketing’, but just needed to type it in correctly. They saw a ‘T’ and typed an ‘L’. If everybody in China has mandatory English in school for who knows how many years on end, can they not recognize the English alphabet in fairly standard fonts? This scares me. Really.

I have to wonder when they are going to have the guts to dish out a few bucks to have quality and trustworthy translation services.

Cooper Strange, New Frontier China