Emergency Toilets (Guilin)
Spotted this sign in Guilin:
This is not Chinglish. This is not bad translation. This has got to just be someone’s idea of a joke.
What the Chinese actually says is:
应急避难所 (yìngjí bìnànsuǒ) emergency shelter / place of refuge in an emergency
I feel a little bad for the foreigner sprinting for a toilet like the guy on the sign, and unable to find one in time…
(It is kind of funny, though!)
It’s a stretch, but you don’t think it might still be an artefact of bad machine translation? I’m thinking somehow misparsing 避难 by itself and then 所 is taken as a shorthand for toilet…