Shanghai denies plan of removing 'English' from street signs

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The authorities in Shanghai have denied a recent report in a German newspaper that the city was planning to remove the English street names from signs across the city.

Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that Shanghai had decided to delete all street names written in English from the city's street signs, and commented that the move would cause inconvenience to the huge number of foreigners living in the city.

The Shanghai Oriental Morning Post quotes the Shanghai Road Administration Bureau as saying the proposal was just one of many on a questionnaire soliciting public opinion, but in the end they chose not to implement the idea.

The newspaper says the road authorities in Shanghai send out the questionnaire earlier August, asking whether the signs in the city should be written in both Chinese and English.

A note after the question said that currently the street signs in Shanghai are all written in both Chinese and English, but the majority of the English street names are in Chinese Pinyin, an official Romanization system for writing the sounds of Mandarin Chinese, which is not widely understandable among foreigners. Removing the English names, it said, could reduce the size of street signs, or allow larger Chinese characters making them easier to read.

The oriental Morning Post cited an official from the city's road authorities as saying the purpose of the question was not to completely delete English road names. "Some of the English on the road signs in Shanghai have problems or even errors. We want to amend the problems. We are currently simply soliciting public opinion on this issue. The work will be carried out next year," the official said.

According to the report, some Shanghai citizens said they believe the English road names are necessary, because Shanghai is an international metropolis with huge numbers of foreigners and overseas students, and that the Chinese-English road signs are convenient for them.

Many foreigners in Shanghai also do not support the removal of English on the road signs. A British man named Owen, who has lived in Shanghai for three years, said the city ought simply to correct the errors in the English road names, and not delete them altogether.

A shanghai official said in an interview with the Guangming Newspaper in 2015 that the city had already issued a set of standards on the provision of road names in English. All street signs in Shanghai had been labeled in English since 2001, ahead of the APEC

Shanghai summit. However, the official noted that as Shanghai now has more than 3,000 roads, it is not easy to standardize all the road names in English.

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