Man, Chris O'Brien leaves Xinhua and everything just goes to shit, huh?

The classic story: link

When this came out my buddy checked his version of Kingsoft and sure enough, there it was. I have a newer version and believe it has been changed (although the quality is still pretty low), offensive terms or no.

Thanks for the piece.

I couldn't understand the original piece and had to look up in my Oxford Dictionary for torii and rooter for meaning in the context, which in turn made me even more puzzled. I'll probably blog about it tomorrow.

Could this be put as a (decorated) archway?

Reminds me of this web site: link

Ceremonial Arch.

In use: link link link

Though I don't really see how this is an example of Engrish; it has a delightful scent of the absurd about it, torii sees some use in English.

I had to do a brief for the SCMP based on that Xinhua story. The word "torii" seemed to have too strong connections with Shintoism. The word "rooter" I actually thought said "rooster" the first time. The second time I read it, sans surrealism, I was reminded of the Australian slang - basically it would mean "fucker". Best to change that too, I thought.

I settled for "An historical gateway marking Guozijian, a former imperial college" and "hit by a mechanical digger".

Re Inst, Sure torii gets some use in English... when you're talking about the gateway for a Shinto shrine. This is not the gateway for a Shinto shrine.
Anyway, it's good to see Engrish still going strong, despite the millions of rmb they've pored into eradicating it.
And, I would say decorated arch, or just pailou. Unless I'm mistaken it's not for "ceremonies."

Dict.cn prefers navvy as a translation of 挖土机, though rooter is its second choice.

If you do a google image search of 挖土机 (this is how I often do translations) you mostly get pictures of mechanical diggers. You also get a picture of this beast (which would certainly break Beijing's vehicle height regulations):

link

Brillig, also spelled "Bryllyg" - i just write b/c I see some question here, is from the famous nonsense poem "Jabberwocky" by author Lewis Carroll, who wrote the first part of it as "Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry" and then later fleshed it out as the poem we now know as "Jabberwocky" - the most famous nonsense poem in the English language.

Brillig/Bryllyg means about 4 o clock or "broiling" time, around dinner time. You can easily look this up online. It is considered a "portmanteau" word and while portmanteau words did exist, Carroll is largely credited with making them popular (a contemporary portanteau word would be "smog" - a combination of smoke and fog, for example).

I"m sure this was a minor point in the article, yet it was raised so there is the answer...

be well,

sadi ranson-polizzotti
tant mieux