Chinese English: English Chinese
Reading about “high level round table talks” this week left me feeling a touch vertiginous. I began to worry about spinning out of control. The words took on a life of their own, reinventing themselves in my mind. I started to think it was I who coined the natty little word ‘co2ts’. Trouble was I just couldn’t remember how to pronounce it. So I turned to Google.
Where would we be without Google? Answer: China.
There’s a country where people are striving to improve their English. And where – and I suspect this may be linked to the conspiracy to laugh at editorial staff – there is no shortage management consultants and ‘programs’ who are willing to overcharge the poor Chinese for teaching them.
I use the word ‘dubious’ because I am doubtful about the quality of the English that these ‘trainers’ offer. Would you take English lessons from an outfit that calls itself ‘Excelliance’?
Perhaps you would. May be you like cheesy names. That’s fair enough; we’re all different.
But would you want an English trainer that shows the blatant disregard for proper punctuation that is demonstrated on this page: FAQ for clients.
Asked what’s the best way to improve one’s English, Excelliance says:
“It’s practice. Practice, practice, practice.”
Exclamation marks are much frowned upon these days, but, reading that, I hear a little voice in my head saying:
“You’ll miss me when I’m gone!”
If I were someone else entirely – that is, someone who liked cheesy expressions – I might even be inclined to reply:
“Missing you already!”
But I’m not. I’m the sort of person who gets upset when I see a capital after an endash or a colon, and who can’t think for the life of me why “Business English Training Providers” deserve to be treated like proper nouns.
Excelliance apparently stands for “excellent alliance”. (And there I was thinking it might have something to do with constructing a website on an excel spreadsheet!)
The Excelliance website doesn’t let you open its pages in separate windows or tabs, because it was cobbled together with a cheap disregard for usability. So you have to click through to find this page to find out that ‘English corners’ – not to be confused with those yoghurts – are:
“supplementary classes that are focused on giving your staff an English environment in which they can improve their fluency and have fun at the same time”.
By the way, it’s not really such a great webpage that it’s worth the trouble clicking on the link above. I merely provide it out of some old-fashioned sense of web-etiquette. The only interesting thing on this page is the news that popular topics include human cloning.
And I am still none the wiser at the end of the week, on how to pronounce the word ‘co2ts’.
