People have been criticizing Pete Hoekstra's pathetically xenophobic (and I'd argue also racist in its use of stereotypes) ad, in part for the "pidgin English" that the young woman uses.
What some might not realize is that as bad as her fake accent is, the Chinese that Hoekstra uses on his website is actually much worse.
I went to Hoekstra's imbecilic website after reading David Nir's morning digest, and was surprised to find the following headline:
現在黛比花
Now let me give you a quick rundown of how they (and for those who might not buy this, let me mention that I chair a department of East Asian Studies) came up with this. They looked these three words up:
xianzai 現在 means "now, the present"
daibi 黛比 is one way of translating "Debbie"
huaqian 花钱 means "spend money"
And put them together to translate "Debbie Spend-It-Now" (proof is that 現 and 花 are from different dictionaries).
The problem? First of all, the order is wrong. They put the name in the middle, which would be like writing "Bozo the Clown" as "Clown Bozo the." Then they left off qian 钱 "money" after "spend". But it is a transitive verb, so people would read hua 花 as a noun, which means flower. I'm not a native speaker but when I first looked at it this is what it meant to me:
NOW DEBBIE FLOWER
Just to double check I sent it to a friend who is a native speaker (and lives in Michigan as it turns out). This was the reply:
You are very right in pointing out that incomprehensible Chinese, which doesn't make sense at all in their original order.
Indeed.
Which is, I'm afraid, totally characteristic of a Republican. Scapegoat Chinese people and make fun of them because they sometimes forget to pluralize, and then have a website with a Chinese banner that is basically incomprehensible.