Contact window

I was talking to one of my colleagues the other day, and I thought I heard her say, "You need to talk to the contact window."  "I'm sorry?" I said, "Are you saying 'contact window'?"  It turns out that the Chinese word for "contact person" is "联络窗口", which literally means "contact window", and that Taiwanese people generally think that this is a real English word and use it with each other all the time.  There are an awful lot of English teachers in Taiwan who are native English speakers, but I suppose there are also enough English teachers who are Taiwanese to perpetuate the mistake.


Amazingly, that afternoon I received an email from Dutch colleague who wrote, "Ask E. for the name of the contact window at the vendor."  He had clearly been talking to too many Taiwanese people.