I am going to disagree with you on your comments about pin yin. I have been many places in China, and Fujian has possibly some of the worst Putonghua (Mandarin) pronunciation I have ever heard. I think the only worse places I have been to are Hong Kong and Xinjiang. (note: by “worst” I mean “non-standard” not “bad.”) The reason people in Fujian mispronounce so many words (i.e.猪肉 -> zu lou, 吃饭 -> ci huan, 石狮市 -> si si si) is not because they do not know the pin yin. It is because in most Fujian dialects the tongue is never raised, (so sh -> s, ch -> c, zh -> z, and r -> l). They know the “right” way to pronounce it, they just aren’t used to doing it. People in Gansu province also speak a dialect very different from Putonghua, so they also learn Putonghua from pinyin. However, because their dialect has the raised tongue, their Putonghua comes out much more standard than the Putonghua from people in Fujian. This is similar to foreigners studying Chinese. When I speak Chinese I always know what tone each word is supposed to be. But because my native language doesn’t have tones, often my tones come out wrong, making my words difficult for Chinese people to understand. So I do not think encouraging pin yin will help standardize the pronunciation of Putonghua.

Actually, my original criticism was not that they used pinyin in the translation, but that they used so many letters strung together without any spaces in between. So for example, I think it could be potentially useful to transliterate a sign to “fu zhou huo che zhan,” but something like “fuzhoukangyoumaoyiyouxiangongsi” seems a little more far fetched.