Many signs in urban areas are bilingual in Chinese and English. It cannot escape the notice of even the most casual bilingual observer that many such signs are woefully (and sometimes hilariously) mistranslated. Mistakes can result from wrong segmentation, wrong word choice, wrong grammar, or inappropriate style, which is particularly important in Chinese. Mistakes can also result from missing crucial information or lack of understanding of English. There are also the ‘innovative analogies’, which give rise to non-existent English words. Also frequently observed are inconsistencies, wavering between the two strategies of pinyin transliteration and meaning translation. The inclusion of mistranslated signs can be pedagogically useful in more than one way. Studying mistranslated signs is an exercise in contrastive analysis. Through detailed analysis of the causes of the mistakes, such signs can be used as negative examples in the teaching of both Chinese and English. They can also be useful to the study and practice of translation.

This chapter defends three ideas. (1) That negligence is essentially a conative failure to exercise due care. The negligent agent doesn’t care enough about a relevant moral aim. (2) Resultantly, the potential cognitive failures of agents, whether they foresee or fail to foresee certain risks of harm, are only incidentally relevant to their negligence. In this way, (3) negligence is conceptually contiguous with recklessness. The hallmark of both reckless and negligence conduct is an insufficient regard for the legitimate interests of others, and what separates them is better understood in terms of conative differences in how each agent disregards those interests, rather than cognitive differences in advertence. I examine these claims in the context of a puzzle regarding negligence and foresight, and consider the implications of my conclusions for negligence culpability in morality and the traditional hierarchy of mens rea in the law.