Category: Readings

‘Chinglish’ website targets Asians lost in mistranslation

by Clifford Coonan in Beijing

CHINA: Rich parents in the United States are desperately seeking
Chinese nannies to tutor their charges in Mandarin, the language of the
future for westerners keen to make inroads in China. Meanwhile, in
China, 300 million people are learning English, the language of their
future.

Both tongues are de rigueur among the aspiring middle classes in their
respective linguistic catchment areas, but both languages are also
notoriously difficult to learn.

Betwixt these two heavy burdens of linguistic expectations steps
chinglish.com – http://www.chinglish.com – an online service that translates
from Chinese into English and back again.

“Chinglish.com sees its mission in facilitating communication between
speakers of Chinese and English. As far as we are concerned,
international organisations will only have two official languages of
work in the future: Chinese and English. Our portal can save billions of
dollars in translation and interpretation costs,” said Marius van
Bergen, chief executive of the Chinglish website, which launched this
week.

“Chinglish’s mission is to promote linguistic and cultural exchange
between China and the West by creating a virtual internet community in
which Chinese and English coexist and enrich each other,” Mr van Bergen
said in a statement.

Chinglish is a word that means a sort of Chinese-English pidgin. It is
so widespread in Asia that it effectively functions as a creole
language, but sometimes it does look funny on signposts.

A personal favourite is “F**k the certain price of goods” instead of
“Sale Now On”, while “Children is not recommended” also rings true.
“Enter the mouth”, a mistranslation of the Chinese characters for
“Entrance” is also very common on signposts, causing blushes.

The Chinese government is running a major drive to standardise the use
of English on public signs before the Beijing Olympics in 2008. A group
called the “Beijing Speaks to the World Committee” is scouring the
capital looking for signs lost in mistranslation. For instance,
Beijing’s Park of Ethnic Minorities was signposted, hilariously, as
“Racist Park”. But not for long. (Fulltext from The Irish Times – Nov 3, 2006)

I found this book by coincidence when I returned China Dawn.

Rachel DeWoskin, a Columbia graduate spent a great part of the 1990s in Beijing, when I left the country for the US. We both experienced cultural shock in each other’s countries in the mid-1990s. Her book gives me the sensational description of Chinese urban life, which seems so far away from me. It’s easy and fun to read and not as fluffy as the cover suggests.

Food for thought and an eye-catching post on Free Ranger Librarian.

Some quotes:

“The user is not broken. Your system is broken until proven otherwise.”

“Your website is your ambassador to tomorrow’s taxpayers. They will meet the website long before they see your building, your physical resources, or your people.”

Not just young students, 4 American librarians contacted me yesterday and today for their questions coming up from our website. A librarian in California and another one in China emailed me about our blog.

by Keith Burnett

Fortnightly Mailing, May 25, 2006

Jonathan B. Bengtson
Library Journal (04/15/06) P. 2

While digitization projects in libraries have been around for a number of years, in the past 18 months the possibilities of digitization and the cultural impact of such scanning projects have leapt dramatically beyond the confines of academia. Making the full text of libraries’ holdings available digitally is without question a natural next step in widening access to our collections—and massive digitization projects, such as that of the Open Content Alliance (OCA), have brought us into a new era.

Asian Library’s rare books would make a good digitization project.

This is a book written by Dennie Heye, an information scientist at the library of a Fortune 500 global energy firm. According to Heye, his book is written for “professional library and Information Services (LIS) staff and LIS students who want to be more successful as information professionals”. Unfortunately I couldn’t locate a copy in any local library here in the Greater Vancouver area. A search in WorldCat revealed that only McGill University had a holding of this book in Canada. From the table of content, however, we can at least get a glimpse of what characteristics we should possess(or achieve for) in order to be a competent Information Professional.
Here is the table of content:
Introduction
You are creative and keen to innovate
You are a search engine guru
You see the big picture
You maintain a healthy work–life balance
You show leadership
You can persuade others
You are an effective networker
You know how you can add value
You have effective presentation skills
You know how to measure value
You manage your time and use the magical word ‘no’
You know the basics of information architecture
You speak the technical jargon
You can manage a project
You know how to effectively market yourself
You are always up to date
Conclusion
Bibliography

For those of you who want to know more about this book and its author, you may go to Amazon.

This weekend I continue to read China Dawn , and learnt the history of Chinese IT industry that’s also the history made by “sea tuttles”. Feng Bo, a California bus boy a decade ago grew to a banker funding entrepreneus in his native China.Bo says, “If we don’t develop a vibrant IT economy, China will do little more than continue to make shoes for Nike.” In 1994, Bo, who headed back to China with a Robertson Stephens business card and not much more, began a search for entrepreneus working on promising technologies. He had heard about Wang Zhidong, the youthful founder of SRS, and Yan Yanchou, who wrote the first Chinese DOS.

“Bo searched them out at a decrepit school building set on a deserted street at the outskirts of Zhongguancun. To get in the school building, Bo climbed over the metal fence, pushed open a brittle door, and wondered through dimly lit hallways, crunching broken galss. “
What a humble start!

“Ten Top Technologies for Librarians 2006” by Michael Stephens at OPAL April 6, 2006

The author, Peter Hessler, talked about the background of his new book today on campus. He made a friend, the Uighur trader, whom he wrote about in this book in Yabaolu, where I lived in Beijing. Can’t wait to read this one.

From Booklist
Hessler, who has lived in China for the past nine years and is the Beijing correspondent for the New Yorker, has written a fascinating and frequently moving account of life in modern China as seen through the eyes of an eclectic group of people, including a minority Uighur, who operates on the fringe of legality, a factory worker, a teacher, a film director, and a scholar who was destroyed by the Cultural Revolution. All of them seem to function as outsiders as they struggle to cope with a nation that is undergoing monumental change. Hessler seamlessly interweaves their stories with the broader context of Chinese contemporary events, and he ties those events effectively with examinations of history, archaeological excavations, and the Chinese struggle to redefine national identity. This is an important and informative work offering a unique perspective on where China may be headed. Jay Freeman
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