10 ms·

China bans English words in media

57 points by J3L2404 16y ago

corin_ 16y ago
Not exactly relevant to the story, but this reminded me of something Aaron Sorkin wrote into the first series of The West Wing which has stuck with me since, and which I think is worthy of repeating even if the Chinese are banning English, rather than trying to make English the official language. It's ludicrous to think that laws need to be created to help protect the language of Shakespeare.
- foljs 16y ago
  > It's ludicrous to think that laws need to be created to help protect the language of Shakespeare. While a nice line, it is wrong. Everything needs protection. Especially great things, like the "language of Shakespeare". Now, this protection need not necessarily be in the form of law, but it sure needs to be in the form of effort.
  - sid0 16y ago
    Everything needs protection. Do you have a logical or empirical basis for this statement, or is this an axiom for you?
    - foljs 16y ago
      > Do you have a logical or empirical basis for this statement, or is this an axiom for you? Ignoring the passive-aggressiveness, yes, I have an empirical basis for this statement. Don't you? Ever heard of the "broken window" theory? Ever heard of entropy? Ever read the history of any cultural aspect, from poetry to jazz, to teaching, to coding? Everything needs protection --people putting in the effort, care, education, craftsmanship and hard work to keep it alive, to improve it and to resist the tendency to decay and dillution.
      - sid0 16y ago
        Ever heard of the "broken window" theory? Ever heard of entropy? Ever read the history of any cultural aspect, from poetry to jazz, to teaching, Yes, some things, those that are vulnerable, need protection. The Bengal tiger needs protection. The tribal languages in the Amazon need protection. English is in no way vulnerable, so it really doesn't need any protection. On the other hand, maybe you need to read the history of how English evolved into what it is today. It certainly isn't because of prescriptivist nonsense like "protect[ing]" the language from "decay and dilution". to coding? Funny you mention that -- one programming language that's been "protect[ed]" from "decay and dilution" a lot is Java, and look what a boring, unimaginative cesspool that's become.
        deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
        foljs 16y ago
        > Funny you mention that -- one programming language that's been "protect[ed]" from "decay and dilution" a lot is Java, and look what a boring, unimaginative cesspool that's become. Huh? Java "protected from decay and dilution"? Witch the exception of SUN never liking native interface linking, Java was ANYTHING BUT protected from decay. Java went about adding and adopting stuff, from Swing to generics to annotations to functional stuff, to remoting, to various EE fads of the day, without ever thinking about whats best about the core language and how to keep it clean and agile. I would have liked it if in place of Java we had a purer language, like, say, Smalltalk.
        sid0 16y ago
        Huh? Java "protected from decay and dilution"? Compare Java to C#. C# was originally a Java clone, but the designers liberally borrowed from everywhere, worrying about actual use cases and not purity of any sort. Today C# is at the boundary between mainstream and academic programming. (It has monads for God's sake. They don't call it monads, of course. They call it LINQ.) Java? It added generics after C# did, and only now is it finally going to add proper closures.
      - 16y ago
  - evilduck 16y ago
    I think the line was pointing out Shakespeare's tendency to just make up words and coin phrases as he needed. Had someone been "protecting" the language, the English language we know today would have been dramatically different. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_influence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_influence
joshklein 16y ago
The French also disallow "franglais" - a mix of French and English - in media, in order to avoid polluting their language. This seems like a par for the course from a nation that looked until the 1500s like it would be the dominant world power before it turned inward.
- paganel 16y ago
  I'd say the 1500s belonged to the Spanish, who lost it big, very big, and the French came soon afterward to fill the gap, until Berezina and Waterloo. I was very surprised when I first found that around 1800 France had a population of ~29 million while England only had ~8 million.
  - joshklein 16y ago
    Highly recommended: Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Paul Kennedy) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great_Powers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great_... You're absolutely right about the Spanish, but it would be more appropriate to say the Hapsburgs, because what we're really talking about here is Spain, Austria-Hungry, the Balkans, The Holy Roman Empire... a huge portion of Europe all controlled centrally. The French followed them, and for a period, the state of power was essentially France vs everyone else. England took off later, and that's the history most of us (Americans) are more familiar with. BUT... this is a very Eurocentric view of history. There was a tremendous amount of other stuff going on leading up to and during this period in China, India, and what was once the Ottoman empire. In hindsight there are many reasons why our planet eventually became Eurocentric, but in 1500 that was not at all apparent - if things in China had gone differently; if they had not closed out new, outside, innovative ideas, we could very well have a very Chinese world today.
    - ygd 16y ago
      > Austria-Hungry Excuse my spelling-nazism, but I believe that should be Austria-Hungary. Austria-Hungry would mean something completely different.
yock 16y ago
The link is to the BBC, but this story is in the US newspapers today as well. The irony there is that plenty of Americans seem to want exactly this, and perhaps more, from their government as well. Yet it's portrayed as a negative in the English-speaking press.
- dantheman 16y ago
  I don't think so, English incorporates words from other languages all the time. I think there are Americans that are against things being written in foreign languages, but not against incorporating foreign words as part of the English vocabulary.
  - zppx 16y ago
    Some countries have a linguistic policy that limits this, European Portuguese (this is not generally the case in Brazilian Portuguese), Icelandic and French for example.
  - tokenadult 16y ago
    Indeed, the linguist Ronald Wardhaugh shows in his historical studies that one of the reasons English has won out over French as a world language is that English makes no attempt to be "pure" but rather adapts to how speakers use it, making it more user-friendly as a second language for speakers around the world.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- maxawaytoolong 16y ago
  There are people in the USA who push for English as a national language, not the removal of loan words.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
eegilbert 16y ago
This is why India will win in the long-term.
- hcho 16y ago
  Loanword do not really help in learning a language. They can even be detrimental.
  - shard 16y ago
    How might they be detrimental? My Korean acquisition is being greatly sped up by it's large number of English and Chinese loan words. Korean grammar is notoriously difficult already even with the loan words. Having 50% of all the new vocabulary be somewhat recognizable makes not only memorization easier, it makes it possible to sometimes understand words I haven't encountered before. It's definitely been a great aid in getting fluent in Korean.
    - hcho 16y ago
      English loanwords in another language might help an English speaking person, no doubt. I was more thinking a Chinese person trying to learn English. Loanwords tend to pe pronounced quite differently in the host language, which detoriates the accent.
KirinDave 16y ago
It seems to me like this has less to do with linguistic heritage and more to do with controlling people's ability to consume media from an English-tilted Internet. Since most people never get far in foreign language classes, media exposure is a major factor in foreign language literacy.
- raquo 16y ago
  Or it may be done so that people don't get to know how certain events or phenomena are named in English and therefore search for them in Chinese rather than in English, and get much more loyal-to-China results on average.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    Perhaps, but one doesn't need nefarious theories (without doubting the nefariety of the Chinese Government) to explain linguistic chauvinism.
    - willchang 16y ago
      There are two other possible explanations. (1) Languages that borrow don't just borrow when they "need" to. For example, most languages have perfectly good ways to communicate "okay", but may borrow it nonetheless. But over time the borrowing may displace the native words or limit their applicability. The Chinese may be anxious that sinitic words will shrink in semantic scope once widespread borrowing takes over. This is not a disaster from a linguistic point of view, of course; it is just language change. But those that deem foreign borrowings illegitimate out of a sense of nationalism will be left with a sense of a shrinking language. Perhaps this is an element in the chauvinism you mentioned. (2) In the long run, having a language with words of diverse etymologies makes a language harder to learn, cf. English. I don't know if the Chinese government deserves credit for realizing this, though.
      - maw 16y ago
        In the long run, having a language with words of diverse etymologies makes a language harder to learn, cf. English. Interesting point. I wonder to what extent that would continue to be the case if words were regularized (with respect to conjugation and plurals, as well as with respect to spelling).
tibbon 16y ago
Can some words even be expressed in 'pure Chinese'? I see in foreign (primarily spanish-speaking) papers all the time that they have loan-words or just straight up use many of the technical words that English developed. "Internet" "World Wide Web" "iPhone" "HDMI cable" "Digital SLR" Are all pretty much exactly the same in Spanish as English. To remove the 'English' there... well you need to make up totally new words then. Seems a difficult problem. Note: I'm not even great at English some days, and know little about Chinese.
- cglee 16y ago
  The short answer is yes, with abbreviations being possible exceptions. "Internet" and "World Wide Web" already have Chinese counterparts. Other words will just be phonetically similar Chinese phrases, similar to how we write "Beijing" instead of "北京".
- T-zex 16y ago
  All these words could be translated into native languages, except iPhone which is a brand.
- bitwize 16y ago
  I shared a dorm with a lot of native Spanish speakers and were surprised to hear them use the English word weapon to refer to the weapons in first-person shooter games. For example to describe the railgun in Quake: "este weapon es muy lento".
  - huherto 16y ago
    Native spanish speaker here. If you are used to see the word in Englsh, you may even forget what is the word in Spanish. Also, people from Spain are more careful about preserving the language, people from other spanish speaking countries not so much. Spanish speakers living in the US, use Spanglish all the time.
  - gcb 16y ago
    and that's exactly what the chinese are trying to avoid. every country does that to some extent.
anonymous246 16y ago
Obligatory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langua... Full text: http://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit http://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit "It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." One of the most insightful sentences I've ever read. IMHO, non-European languages only have rough equivalents for Renaissance concepts like equality, democracy, scientific inquiry etc (yeah yeah, I know Greece had a so-called democracy; I'm talking about our modern-day understanding of these concepts). Blocking the precise word from being used in Chinese may be a mind-control trick.
- hugh3 16y ago
  I'm confused about your parenthetical Greek remark. Isn't ancient Greek a European language, and doesn't our actual word "democracy" come directly from it? And I'm not so sure that their concept of the meaning of "democracy" was significantly different to ours, even though there were significant differences for how it went on in practice.
  - anonymous246 16y ago
    What I meant is that in Greece only a few people voted (IIRC women and slaves weren't allowed to vote), so it wasn't close to our current understanding of democracy. Unless I'm mistaken and Greece had universal adult franchise. And hence supporting my claim that "democracy" is a Renaissance concept rather than an ancient Greek concept.
    - hugh3 16y ago
      Rennaisance? Even the most advanced modern democracies generally didn't give women the vote until the late 1800s. (Switzerland didn't have it until 1971, and is still one of the most prosperous and peaceful countries on Earth. Germany granted women the vote in 1918, and we all know how that worked out...)
    - burgerbrain 16y ago
patio11 16y ago
Japan has a storied relationship with this question. My say-very-quietly-around-nationalists opinion is that the alphabet has become the fourth major writing system used in modern Japanese, via popular acclamation.
- maxawaytoolong 16y ago
  OK!
ximeng 16y ago
Problem is that it can be fashionable in Chinese to use English to show you are educated. I imagine they want to avoid this kind of thing happening in the mainland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cantonesebillboard.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cantonesebillboard.jpg Here is the original announcement in Chinese: http://www.gapp.gov.cn/cms/html/21/508/201012/708310.html http://www.gapp.gov.cn/cms/html/21/508/201012/708310.html and a rough Google translated version: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&u=http://www.gapp.gov.cn/cms/html/21/508/201012/708310.html&act=url http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...
- Natsu 16y ago
  Personally, I liked the sign that got translated as "Translation Server Error" But there's a ton of misuse on both sides. God help you if you believe that there's a "Chinese alphabet" that things like initials can be translated into (http://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/ http://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/ has a long list of tattoo victims of that gibberish "Asian font"), but there's plenty of the reverse, too. I still haven't tried "Pocari Sweat" (a common sports drink that doesn't sound very appetizing; there should be pictures of it on engrish.com among other places).
jsmcgd 16y ago
This seems like a great mechanism for the populous to protest against the government. Casually and habitually using forbidden words will demonstrate and communicate their dissatisfaction and because it isn't a serious crime it can flourish and overtime erode authority and popular support. An own goal.
shard 16y ago
Unless they go all the way back and scrub out PinYin as well, English is always going to be engrained in China.
- tokenadult 16y ago
  What does the Hanyu pinyin spelling system for Modern Standard Chinese have to do with English?
camrober 16y ago
The French tried to do this with the French language but failed. The most obvious success story is the Japanese language's katakana syllabury that allows English words to be written and/or abbreviated in japanese. For the Japanese, 99.9% of post-war technical words are written in Japanese katakana but then the Japanese have always had a history of successfully adopting and adapting.

57 points by J3L2404 16y ago

Not exactly relevant to the story, but this reminded me of something Aaron Sorkin wrote into the first series of The West Wing which has stuck with me since, and which I think is worthy of repeating even if the Chinese are banning English, rather than trying to make English the official language. It's ludicrous to think that laws need to be created to help protect the language of Shakespeare.

foljs 16y ago
> It's ludicrous to think that laws need to be created to help protect the language of Shakespeare. While a nice line, it is wrong. Everything needs protection. Especially great things, like the "language of Shakespeare". Now, this protection need not necessarily be in the form of law, but it sure needs to be in the form of effort.
- sid0 16y ago
  Everything needs protection. Do you have a logical or empirical basis for this statement, or is this an axiom for you?
  - foljs 16y ago
    > Do you have a logical or empirical basis for this statement, or is this an axiom for you? Ignoring the passive-aggressiveness, yes, I have an empirical basis for this statement. Don't you? Ever heard of the "broken window" theory? Ever heard of entropy? Ever read the history of any cultural aspect, from poetry to jazz, to teaching, to coding? Everything needs protection --people putting in the effort, care, education, craftsmanship and hard work to keep it alive, to improve it and to resist the tendency to decay and dillution.
    - sid0 16y ago
      Ever heard of the "broken window" theory? Ever heard of entropy? Ever read the history of any cultural aspect, from poetry to jazz, to teaching, Yes, some things, those that are vulnerable, need protection. The Bengal tiger needs protection. The tribal languages in the Amazon need protection. English is in no way vulnerable, so it really doesn't need any protection. On the other hand, maybe you need to read the history of how English evolved into what it is today. It certainly isn't because of prescriptivist nonsense like "protect[ing]" the language from "decay and dilution". to coding? Funny you mention that -- one programming language that's been "protect[ed]" from "decay and dilution" a lot is Java, and look what a boring, unimaginative cesspool that's become.
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
      - foljs 16y ago
        > Funny you mention that -- one programming language that's been "protect[ed]" from "decay and dilution" a lot is Java, and look what a boring, unimaginative cesspool that's become. Huh? Java "protected from decay and dilution"? Witch the exception of SUN never liking native interface linking, Java was ANYTHING BUT protected from decay. Java went about adding and adopting stuff, from Swing to generics to annotations to functional stuff, to remoting, to various EE fads of the day, without ever thinking about whats best about the core language and how to keep it clean and agile. I would have liked it if in place of Java we had a purer language, like, say, Smalltalk.
        sid0 16y ago
        Huh? Java "protected from decay and dilution"? Compare Java to C#. C# was originally a Java clone, but the designers liberally borrowed from everywhere, worrying about actual use cases and not purity of any sort. Today C# is at the boundary between mainstream and academic programming. (It has monads for God's sake. They don't call it monads, of course. They call it LINQ.) Java? It added generics after C# did, and only now is it finally going to add proper closures.
    - 16y ago
- evilduck 16y ago
  I think the line was pointing out Shakespeare's tendency to just make up words and coin phrases as he needed. Had someone been "protecting" the language, the English language we know today would have been dramatically different. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_influence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_influence

joshklein 16y ago

The French also disallow "franglais" - a mix of French and English - in media, in order to avoid polluting their language. This seems like a par for the course from a nation that looked until the 1500s like it would be the dominant world power before it turned inward.

paganel 16y ago
I'd say the 1500s belonged to the Spanish, who lost it big, very big, and the French came soon afterward to fill the gap, until Berezina and Waterloo. I was very surprised when I first found that around 1800 France had a population of ~29 million while England only had ~8 million.
- joshklein 16y ago
  Highly recommended: Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Paul Kennedy) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great_Powers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great_... You're absolutely right about the Spanish, but it would be more appropriate to say the Hapsburgs, because what we're really talking about here is Spain, Austria-Hungry, the Balkans, The Holy Roman Empire... a huge portion of Europe all controlled centrally. The French followed them, and for a period, the state of power was essentially France vs everyone else. England took off later, and that's the history most of us (Americans) are more familiar with. BUT... this is a very Eurocentric view of history. There was a tremendous amount of other stuff going on leading up to and during this period in China, India, and what was once the Ottoman empire. In hindsight there are many reasons why our planet eventually became Eurocentric, but in 1500 that was not at all apparent - if things in China had gone differently; if they had not closed out new, outside, innovative ideas, we could very well have a very Chinese world today.
  - ygd 16y ago
    > Austria-Hungry Excuse my spelling-nazism, but I believe that should be Austria-Hungary. Austria-Hungry would mean something completely different.

yock 16y ago

The link is to the BBC, but this story is in the US newspapers today as well. The irony there is that plenty of Americans seem to want exactly this, and perhaps more, from their government as well. Yet it's portrayed as a negative in the English-speaking press.

dantheman 16y ago
I don't think so, English incorporates words from other languages all the time. I think there are Americans that are against things being written in foreign languages, but not against incorporating foreign words as part of the English vocabulary.
- zppx 16y ago
  Some countries have a linguistic policy that limits this, European Portuguese (this is not generally the case in Brazilian Portuguese), Icelandic and French for example.
- tokenadult 16y ago
  Indeed, the linguist Ronald Wardhaugh shows in his historical studies that one of the reasons English has won out over French as a world language is that English makes no attempt to be "pure" but rather adapts to how speakers use it, making it more user-friendly as a second language for speakers around the world.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
maxawaytoolong 16y ago
There are people in the USA who push for English as a national language, not the removal of loan words.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

eegilbert 16y ago

This is why India will win in the long-term.

hcho 16y ago
Loanword do not really help in learning a language. They can even be detrimental.
- shard 16y ago
  How might they be detrimental? My Korean acquisition is being greatly sped up by it's large number of English and Chinese loan words. Korean grammar is notoriously difficult already even with the loan words. Having 50% of all the new vocabulary be somewhat recognizable makes not only memorization easier, it makes it possible to sometimes understand words I haven't encountered before. It's definitely been a great aid in getting fluent in Korean.
  - hcho 16y ago
    English loanwords in another language might help an English speaking person, no doubt. I was more thinking a Chinese person trying to learn English. Loanwords tend to pe pronounced quite differently in the host language, which detoriates the accent.

KirinDave 16y ago

It seems to me like this has less to do with linguistic heritage and more to do with controlling people's ability to consume media from an English-tilted Internet. Since most people never get far in foreign language classes, media exposure is a major factor in foreign language literacy.

raquo 16y ago
Or it may be done so that people don't get to know how certain events or phenomena are named in English and therefore search for them in Chinese rather than in English, and get much more loyal-to-China results on average.
- hugh3 16y ago
  Perhaps, but one doesn't need nefarious theories (without doubting the nefariety of the Chinese Government) to explain linguistic chauvinism.
  - willchang 16y ago
    There are two other possible explanations. (1) Languages that borrow don't just borrow when they "need" to. For example, most languages have perfectly good ways to communicate "okay", but may borrow it nonetheless. But over time the borrowing may displace the native words or limit their applicability. The Chinese may be anxious that sinitic words will shrink in semantic scope once widespread borrowing takes over. This is not a disaster from a linguistic point of view, of course; it is just language change. But those that deem foreign borrowings illegitimate out of a sense of nationalism will be left with a sense of a shrinking language. Perhaps this is an element in the chauvinism you mentioned. (2) In the long run, having a language with words of diverse etymologies makes a language harder to learn, cf. English. I don't know if the Chinese government deserves credit for realizing this, though.
    - maw 16y ago
      In the long run, having a language with words of diverse etymologies makes a language harder to learn, cf. English. Interesting point. I wonder to what extent that would continue to be the case if words were regularized (with respect to conjugation and plurals, as well as with respect to spelling).

tibbon 16y ago

Can some words even be expressed in 'pure Chinese'? I see in foreign (primarily spanish-speaking) papers all the time that they have loan-words or just straight up use many of the technical words that English developed. "Internet" "World Wide Web" "iPhone" "HDMI cable" "Digital SLR" Are all pretty much exactly the same in Spanish as English. To remove the 'English' there... well you need to make up totally new words then. Seems a difficult problem. Note: I'm not even great at English some days, and know little about Chinese.

cglee 16y ago
The short answer is yes, with abbreviations being possible exceptions. "Internet" and "World Wide Web" already have Chinese counterparts. Other words will just be phonetically similar Chinese phrases, similar to how we write "Beijing" instead of "北京".
T-zex 16y ago
All these words could be translated into native languages, except iPhone which is a brand.
bitwize 16y ago
I shared a dorm with a lot of native Spanish speakers and were surprised to hear them use the English word weapon to refer to the weapons in first-person shooter games. For example to describe the railgun in Quake: "este weapon es muy lento".
- huherto 16y ago
  Native spanish speaker here. If you are used to see the word in Englsh, you may even forget what is the word in Spanish. Also, people from Spain are more careful about preserving the language, people from other spanish speaking countries not so much. Spanish speakers living in the US, use Spanglish all the time.
- gcb 16y ago
  and that's exactly what the chinese are trying to avoid. every country does that to some extent.

anonymous246 16y ago

Obligatory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langua... Full text: http://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit http://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit "It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." One of the most insightful sentences I've ever read. IMHO, non-European languages only have rough equivalents for Renaissance concepts like equality, democracy, scientific inquiry etc (yeah yeah, I know Greece had a so-called democracy; I'm talking about our modern-day understanding of these concepts). Blocking the precise word from being used in Chinese may be a mind-control trick.

hugh3 16y ago
I'm confused about your parenthetical Greek remark. Isn't ancient Greek a European language, and doesn't our actual word "democracy" come directly from it? And I'm not so sure that their concept of the meaning of "democracy" was significantly different to ours, even though there were significant differences for how it went on in practice.
- anonymous246 16y ago
  What I meant is that in Greece only a few people voted (IIRC women and slaves weren't allowed to vote), so it wasn't close to our current understanding of democracy. Unless I'm mistaken and Greece had universal adult franchise. And hence supporting my claim that "democracy" is a Renaissance concept rather than an ancient Greek concept.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    Rennaisance? Even the most advanced modern democracies generally didn't give women the vote until the late 1800s. (Switzerland didn't have it until 1971, and is still one of the most prosperous and peaceful countries on Earth. Germany granted women the vote in 1918, and we all know how that worked out...)
  - burgerbrain 16y ago

patio11 16y ago

Japan has a storied relationship with this question. My say-very-quietly-around-nationalists opinion is that the alphabet has become the fourth major writing system used in modern Japanese, via popular acclamation.

maxawaytoolong 16y ago
OK!

ximeng 16y ago

Problem is that it can be fashionable in Chinese to use English to show you are educated. I imagine they want to avoid this kind of thing happening in the mainland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cantonesebillboard.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cantonesebillboard.jpg Here is the original announcement in Chinese: http://www.gapp.gov.cn/cms/html/21/508/201012/708310.html http://www.gapp.gov.cn/cms/html/21/508/201012/708310.html and a rough Google translated version: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&u=http://www.gapp.gov.cn/cms/html/21/508/201012/708310.html&act=url http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...

Natsu 16y ago
Personally, I liked the sign that got translated as "Translation Server Error" But there's a ton of misuse on both sides. God help you if you believe that there's a "Chinese alphabet" that things like initials can be translated into (http://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/ http://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/ has a long list of tattoo victims of that gibberish "Asian font"), but there's plenty of the reverse, too. I still haven't tried "Pocari Sweat" (a common sports drink that doesn't sound very appetizing; there should be pictures of it on engrish.com among other places).

jsmcgd 16y ago

This seems like a great mechanism for the populous to protest against the government. Casually and habitually using forbidden words will demonstrate and communicate their dissatisfaction and because it isn't a serious crime it can flourish and overtime erode authority and popular support. An own goal.

shard 16y ago

Unless they go all the way back and scrub out PinYin as well, English is always going to be engrained in China.

tokenadult 16y ago
What does the Hanyu pinyin spelling system for Modern Standard Chinese have to do with English?

camrober 16y ago

The French tried to do this with the French language but failed. The most obvious success story is the Japanese language's katakana syllabury that allows English words to be written and/or abbreviated in japanese. For the Japanese, 99.9% of post-war technical words are written in Japanese katakana but then the Japanese have always had a history of successfully adopting and adapting.