All over Southeast Asia, there are examples of signs badly translated into English.  In my experience, Thailand seems to have a higher percentage of “crazy English” signs than anywhere else in the region.  There’s even a word for it:  Tinglish, which is a combination of “English” and the Thai word, ting tong, meaning “odd” (equivalent to the English “ding dong”).  The reason that the Thais making these signs rarely enlist the aid of the plethora of native English speakers lurking about is that they don’t want to “lose face” by asking a farang (foreigner) for help in any way.

Thus, we get gems such as the above example along a loading dock driveway at Central Festival, Phuket’s oldest Western-style shopping mall (opened in December 2004).  I believe they are trying to restrict motorbikes from parking along a fence that divides the two lanes of the driveway (although there are at least half-a-dozen bikes there at any given time).  “No Parking” would have been better.  The bottom part warns that violators will have a lock fastened on the front wheel of their motorbike, the removal of which will necessitate their paying a fine of 500 baht.  My guess is that this is the result of entering the Thai into Google Translate.

The one below is much, much better.  However, I believe they mean that security will check the trunk (or, “boot” if you prefer).  The only other mistakes are the capital S in “search”, no spacing between the first full stop and “We”, and the misuse of the pronoun “you” with the possessive pronoun “your” is required.  This is about as good as Thai-made signs come.