SHANGHAI—For English speakers with subpar Chinese skills, daily life in China offers a confounding array of choices. At banks, there are machines for “;cash withdrawing”; and “;cash recycling.”; The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “;fried enema,”; “;monolithic tree mushroom stem squid”; and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “;The Jew's Ear Juice.”;

Those who have had a bit too much monolithic tree mushroom stem squid could find themselves requiring roomier attire: extra-large sizes sometimes come in “;fatso”; or “;lard bucket”; categories. These and other fashions can be had at the clothing chain known as Scat.

Go ahead and snicker, although by last Saturday's opening of the Expo 2010 in Shanghai, which is expected to draw more than 70 million visitors over its six-month run, these and other uniquely Chinese maladaptations of the English language were supposed to have been largely excised.

Well, that at least is what the Shanghai Commission for the Management of Language Use has been trying to accomplish during the past two years.

Fortified by an army of 600 volunteers and a politburo of adroit English speakers, the commission has fixed more than 10,000 public signs (farewell “;Teliot”; and “;urine district”;), rewritten English-language historical placards and helped hundreds of restaurants recast offerings.

The campaign is partly modeled on Beijing's herculean effort to clean up English signage for the 2008 Summer Olympics, which led to the replacement of 400,000 street signs, 1,300 restaurant menus and such exemplars of impropriety as the Dongda Anus Hospital—now known as the Dongda Proctology Hospital. Gone, too, is Racist Park, a cultural attraction that has since been rechristened Minorities Park.

“;The purpose of signage is to be useful, not to be amusing,”; said Zhao Huimin, the former Chinese ambassador to the United States who, as director general of the capital's Foreign Affairs Office, has been leading the fight for linguistic standardization and sobriety.

But while the war on mangled English may be considered a signature achievement of government officials, aficionados of what is known as Chinglish are wringing their hands in despair.

Oliver Lutz Radtke, a former German radio reporter who may well be the world's foremost authority on Chinglish, said he believed that China should embrace the fanciful melding of English and Chinese as the hallmark of a dynamic, living language. As he sees it, Chinglish is an endangered species that deserves preservation.

“;If you standardize all these signs, you not only take away the little giggle you get while strolling in the park but you lose a window into the Chinese mind,”; said Radtke, who is the author of a pair of picture books that feature giggle-worthy Chinglish signs in their natural habitat.