David Henry Hwang’s entertaining new play, Chinglish , which has just opened on Broadway, is about what is lost and what gets inflated in translation. It begins with a British consultant giving the main character, American businessman Daniel Cavanaugh, some advice so he can get around the widespread problem of poor interpreting: “When doing business in China, always bring your own translator.”

Daniel has come to Guiyang, the small provincial capital of Guizhou, to sell English signage to the city for its fancy new arts centre. Ever since French architect Paul Andreu built a titanium and glass fantasy of a cultural centre above an artificial lake in Beijing ahead of the 2008 Olympics, every provincial capital in China wants one.

On a trip to China in 2005, Hwang, whose previous works include the award-winning 1988 play M Butterfly, visited just such an arts centre in Shanghai. It featured sleek German design and the best Italian marble, but also the badly translated signage that is ubiquitous in China. The rest room for the disabled had a sign reading: “Deformed Man’s Toilet.”