Taiwan is touting its “English living environment” with a “carnival” (i.e., a room with a bunch of booths from various government agencies and a few businesses, each with some display at least vaguely associated with English). Awards will be given; I wonder how many of them will be deserved.

Here’s a sample from the carnival Web site’s introduction to the “mascots” for the event:

Hello! We are Mascot Profile, because theme of this year is (ENJOY TAIWAN), make us to be siblings organic to assemble to get together too. In the face of the change of the world environments, because the progress of science and technology makes the mutual distance shorten, so world has merged together already a village . In fact, Taiwan is the same too, because the plasticity of Taiwan is strong, accept degree high, already already like world village, there are various kinds of culture and characteristic . This kind of phenomenon is six of ours. Introduce myself by us right away now , see which one be most lovely!

This machine-translated monstrosity is nothing short of a disgrace.

As for why they need mascots, or why most of these represent people from countries where English is not the native language — that’s beyond me. Perhaps it’s to distract people from the disastrously bad English.

For anyone who would like to attend and perhaps get to see how the “original flavor in Taiwan of Israel opens the prelude, will praise 33 excellent organs,”* the event opens today (Tuesday, December 20) at Taipei 101. For details and more atrocious English, see the Web site for the 2005 English Carnival.

* No, I didn’t make that up either.