Games! Yeeeah

The NY Times's Olympic blog has an interesting post about the difficulty of translating the Chinese cheers heard at Beijing venues into other languages. As the post explains, a literal translation of a popular cheer to English means something about gasoline.

One of the most perplexing language issues at the Olympic games is how to translate the all-purpose Chinese cheer, “加油! ” (jiayou!), into English (or any other language).

加 means to “add.” 油 means “oil” or “fuel.” (And technically gas stations are often called 加油站, or jiayou stops). But it’s almost never chanted in the context of a gas station. Instead, you’ll hear it often chanted at these Olympic games when the audience wants the competitors to dig deep and put in an extra effort. Here is a YouTube video explaining how to chant 加油 to go with the official Olympic civilized chant hand gestures).

But around the Web you can find a variety of struggles as the Chinese try to translate this all-purpose cheer into English. (On some chat boards it even makes it into the category of most frequently asked translations.)
Finally,the good translation "Zhongguo Jiayou" is "Go China!".