Special objects

Sorry for the proliferation of sign-related posts this week, but I keep seeing them. There's this sign in the lavs in the building where I work:

As you can see, it's an instruction to ladies to throw sanitary products in the special sanitary bins, not down the loo (if they really want us to do that they should provide more than one bin and put them inside the cubicles instead of outside). It tells us that in English, Chinese and Arabic, because it's in the school of modern languages and there are lots of Chinese and Arabic students about.

It also tells us the same again in English, with different wording. It's considerably more polite and almost affectionate in the wording ('please dear ladies') than the first English text, and it also differs in using the euphemism 'special objects'. It has one error in it, using singular 'it' to refer back to the plural 'special objects', although this doesn't necessarily mean it was written by a non-native speaker. Otherwise, there is nothing wrong with the English versions that couldn't be fixed with a couple of punctuation marks.

But WHY are there two English versions? My guess is that the second is a translation of the Chinese. I really don't know why this would be the case, but that's how it reads to me. I think the English was written first, then translated into Chinese (and Arabic) and then, for some reason, translated back to English. I'd love someone who reads Chinese to tell me if that's true.

Alternatively, the second English text might have been written first by a Chinese speaker, and then some native English speaker told them it was a bit polite for a sign and rewrote it in a more 'English' way, and somehow both ended up being used.

(By the way, I've assumed Chinese simply because there are a lot more Chinese students in this school than Arabic, so it's just a probability. The above could equally apply to Arabic instead.)