Three Bins in One A4 Panel: Mapping Shanghai Categories onto Auckland's
You are translating a public notice for Auckland Transport for display in a suburb with a large recent mainland-Chinese population. The English says: 'Please put your rubbish in the correct bin. Recycling goes in the blue bin; food scraps go in the green-lidded bin; general waste goes in the red bin. Bins must be out by 7am.' Your draft uses 垃圾 for rubbish. A reviewer who grew up in Shanghai says 垃圾 is fine but that readers will mentally map the notice onto Shanghai's 干垃圾／湿垃圾／可回收物 system, which does not match Auckland's three-bin scheme, and that 厨余垃圾 risks being read as equivalent to 湿垃圾. Constraints: the notice must fit one A4 panel, with a maximum of 90 Chinese characters; Auckland Transport forbids adding explanatory text not in the original; a pictogram of the three bins is available and will occupy the top third of the panel.
1. How would you render the three bin categories to minimise mis-mapping?
Read the worked answer
Anchor each category on colour plus material, and avoid the Shanghai pair entirely.
- Blue: 可回收物 - the established term, and the same word appears on Shanghai blue bins, so it transfers without distortion. Prefer 可回收物 over 可回收垃圾 for a public notice.
- Green-lidded: 厨余垃圾（食物残渣） - 厨余 is accurate for food scraps, but the bracketed 食物残渣 does the work the reviewer is worried about: it names the material rather than the Shanghai category. If the character budget is tight, 食物残渣 alone is safer than 厨余 alone, because it cannot be mapped onto 湿垃圾.
- Red: 一般垃圾 or 其他垃圾. 其他垃圾 is the more common collocation and matches what readers have seen, but it invites the Shanghai reading in which 其他 is the residual category after a wet/dry split. 一般垃圾 avoids that frame.
Order matters. Put the colour first in each line, because the pictogram is colour-coded and the reader will match colour before reading. 蓝色桶：可回收物 reads faster than a sentence.
Do not use 干垃圾 or 湿垃圾 anywhere, even negatively. Naming them would import the comparison the panel cannot then explain within its character cap.
2. Assess whether 垃圾 or 废弃物 should head the notice.
Read the worked answer
Use 垃圾, but not in the opening position where the English has 'rubbish'.
The case for 垃圾. It is the dominant mainland colloquial term, and the audience is recent mainland migrants. 废弃物 is formal, bureaucratic and in mainland usage leans towards industrial or hazardous waste; in Taiwan it is the ordinary word, which would give the wrong regional signal. For a kerbside notice, 垃圾 is right.
The problem with the English opening. 'Please put your rubbish in the correct bin' uses 垃圾 as a collective covering all three streams. In Chinese, 垃圾 in the singular tends to be read as general waste specifically, so a sentence meaning 'all your waste' can be read as 'put your general waste in the correct bin' - which is close to circular and may reinforce the red-bin reading.
Recommended solution. Open with an action rather than the noun: 请按颜色分类投放生活垃圾 ('please sort household waste by colour'). 生活垃圾 is the standard administrative term, covers all three streams, and does not collide with the Shanghai categories. 垃圾 then appears only where a single stream is meant.
Cost. 生活垃圾 is two characters longer than 垃圾; at 90 characters that is affordable if the colour lines are written as labels rather than sentences.
3. The reviewer proposes adding the line '上海的分类标准不适用于新西兰'. The client forbids adding text. What do you do?
Read the worked answer
Do not add it unilaterally. Do three things instead.
1. Solve it inside the wording. Most of the mis-mapping risk can be removed by the choices above: colour-first lines, 食物残渣 rather than 厨余 alone, 一般垃圾 rather than 其他垃圾. The panel does not need to mention Shanghai in order to be unambiguous about Auckland. Offer the client a revised 90-character version that demonstrates this.
2. Escalate with a costed choice, not a complaint. Tell the client: the reviewer's concern is real; there are two ways to address it - the revised wording at no extra cost, or one extra line of about 14 characters, which would require either exceeding the 90-character cap or cutting a line from the original. Present the trade-off and let the client decide, since the client owns the brief.
3. If refused, document. Record the reviewer's concern and the decision in the project file. This is standard practice in public-facing translation and protects both the translator and the client if the notice is later criticised.
What not to do. Do not smuggle a warning into the wording ('not the same as Shanghai's system') under the guise of translation. That is unrequested content, and it would make the notice about Shanghai rather than about bins.