Graphic designers and proofreaders—and the businesses and governments they work for—usually succeed at eliminating errors in the text of signs, shirts, and ads. In Taiwan, the normal standards seem relaxed for the English-language portions.

I’m not sure why Taiwan has so much English—maybe due to optimism regarding tourism and business. Whatever the reason, it has resulted in widespread error-ridden, idiosyncratic, and unintentionally poetic English in public typography.

I took these photos during a twelve-day visit to Taiwan. I hadn’t been there in six years. Mistakes and oddities have decreased since I started visiting in the nineties, but they’re still common.

This was for a pistachio drink, I think, at a café. I emailed my parents, who are fluent in English, asking them to translate the middle text. My mom wrote, “Taste the moment, wake up the soul.” My dad didn’t respond. I asked again. He still didn’t respond.

The verbatim translation of the four large Chinese words is “Thick Cheese Egg.” The nonverbatim translation—“CHEESE AND EGG OVERLOAD”—seems preferable.

This store had a long line. My mom said only one party is allowed in at one time, whether it’s an individual, a couple, or a family. There is often an extra space before question marks and exclamation marks in Taiwanese English.

An example of correct English from the Taipei Metro. Cute-looking animals often stand in for humans in Taiwanese signage.

This was next to a giant electronic screen in a subway station. While trying to figure out whether it’s grammatically correct—it isn’t—I found a Facebook group called Taiwan Chinglish.

I found this in Taiwan Chinglish. So much to examine here. The elliptical density of these thirty-three words feels entrancing. I like the focus on motivation and change. Imagine if someone chiseled this into a stone tablet and people found it ten thousand years from now.

Unique message. I also saw a shirt that said ALONEMASTER.

I saw many shirts with positive messages in correct English. This one, at the Taipei Expo Farmer’s Market, was the most direct. I saw it while talking to my mom about the negatives of thinking negatively. I jogged back to the woman to take this photo.

This was in a new mall in a building near my parents’ apartment in Taipei. No mistakes here, in my view—just a simple, calming message.

I approve of contracting “Order sofa” and “Order Bedding.” Capitalizing “Bedding” but not “sofa,” or vice versa, seems unintentional. Good use of italics.

Maybe this was a typo (R and E are adjacent on the keyboard) that got through due to a lack of copyediting by someone fluent in English. The more I look at it, the more acceptable it seems, though.

This was in an area of Jiaoxi—on the east coast—where people pay money to submerge their legs in water while fish eat dead skin off their feet. The name HEAVY TASTE DR. FISH amused and impressed me. There were at least ten such establishments in a one-mile radius. In Taiwan, many versions of the same type of store converge in one area. Another place had four restaurants with kiln-roasted chicken. My mom said it starts with one store’s success, attracting competitors.

Me and my parents at one of the chicken restaurants—the original and largest, with the most advertisements. It claimed to have five patents on its roasting process. Later, a cab driver told us that locals preferred a smaller chicken restaurant that didn’t use frozen chicken. We ate there the next day. An employee there—whose job was to put chickens into kilns—said the bigger place sold “fame,” while they sold “chicken.”

This type of wonky translation has become rare in Taipei but is still common in other places. I enjoy the ungrammatical translations more than the grammatical ones. Here, I like the run-on sentence changing abruptly to a single error-free sentence starting with “And.” It feels friendly.

I like the directness here. The Chinese version was on another sign. The “real estate” seemed to be an empty lot that was completely fenced off. I wonder what they thought would happen if people acted on “election propaganda.”

This was a few feet to the left of the previous sign. I’m not sure why there was so much concern over people messing with this fenced-off area.

There are signs like this everywhere on the island, giving the scientific names for plants, sometimes with the English common names. I haven’t noticed mistakes on these—the binomial nomenclature is always correctly italicized and capitalized.

A correct translation in high-level English at the National Palace Museum in Taipei. While we were there, both my parents separately told me that Chiang Kai-shek’s government transported many artifacts from China to Taiwan, into this museum, during the Chinese Civil War.

People write Chinese on devices by typing the phonetic sounds of words using the Latin alphabet, or by drawing the characters, as my dad does here. I emailed him asking why, and he replied, “Drawing is faster.” I’m not sure what he’s texting. I can read maybe 0.5 percent of Chinese words.

This was in Jiaoxi, where probably less than 0.1 percent of locals would get the English wordplay here. Caffè is “coffee” in Italian, which probably even fewer locals would know. To most people, this sign will look how Chinese looks to people who can’t read Chinese.