Nobody who has lived in Taipei for any number of years will deny that vast improvements have been made in the facilities offered to foreigners living in the city over the past decade. This has included programs to introduce bilingual signage in public institutions and for public services. The flurry of initiatives that has achieved this has extended from Taipei across the country, albeit unevenly.
The mass rapid transit system, bus services, hospitals and government offices are now friendlier environments for the English speaker than they have ever been, an acknowledgement by the central and local governments of the growing foreign community that works or lives in Taiwan -- whether for the short term or the long term.
The fact that the government has taken advantage of the Internet revolution to provide copious amounts of data about government services on the Web has also been a boon to the foreign community. But the fact that huge amounts of information have been converted into English over a relatively short space of time has meant that quality has often been sacrificed to the imperative of being seen to get the job done. Look around, and there is certainly no shortage of misleading, confusing or incorrect English to be found in government publications.
The most recent effort to remedy this has been a campaign launched by the Taipei City Government's Traffic Engineering Office on April 3 to identify errors in "public displays [signs] at principal tourist spots in Taipei, and on Taipei roads."
Self-improvement is a laudable goal, but the question remains: Are the means effective?
This is not the first "Error Identification Activity" sponsored by a department of the Taipei City Government. Last November, the Department of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DBAS) launched a similar campaign, which finished in January, to identify errors in "public displays [signs and announcements, content of Web sites and latest publications] at the DBAS and the Information Management Center."
The Taipei MRT has an ongoing campaign of error identification for its signage as well, and it is possible there are others, but given that information about these activities is often hidden in the depths of various departmental Web sites (and in the case of the Traffic Engineering Office's effort, there is no clear navigable link from the department's front page), it is hard to say. But the question arises about whether the Taipei City Government's good intentions are being expressed in only the most superficial way by the departments concerned.
The fact that individual city departments are promoting these campaigns -- and only for signage in their areas of responsibility -- fatally hurts their effectiveness. The lack of a standard applicable to all areas of the city government speaks volumes. This has been most noticeable in the Herculean struggle that the Taipei City Government faced in its attempts to standardize the Romanization of street names. But even here, having adopted the standard of Hanyu Pinyin, they couldn't resist tinkering, introducing a CamalCase format that makes street signs look like something out of a wiki.
What all these campaigns ignore is that in many cases there is no right and wrong usage. What the public desperately longs for is standardization. Error identification is a good thing, but its impact will be limited if it continues to be carried out in a piecemeal fashion.
Moreover, without some citywide standard of usage, foreigners and locals alike will remain in a state of confusion over accepted English representation of places and services, and no number of campaigns to spot errors can remedy this lack of a wider vision.
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