Waxy.org has an interesting article called Translating “The Economist” Behind China’s Great Firewall. It tells how underground online organization the Eco Team translates every Economist article into Chinese and puts it online.
The greatest part was a line left by commenter Felipe Li:
We’re in your websites, translatin’ your language.
Via Hank.…
Commenter 維特利 recently made this observation:
From reading different blogs I see that there are two kind of situations in mixed families in China:
- American husbands speak Chinese with their Chinese wives and therefore wives aren’t fluent in English.
- Chinese wives speak English with their American husbands and therefore American husbands aren’t fluent in Chinese.
It looks like that real bilingual families are not easy to find:-)
The comment rings true, and it’s something I always suspected was partly …
I received this e-mail from a reader recently:
I just read your piece on counterfeit money. I work for a school in a western province which paid me just before NY. About one third was counterfeit money which I’m having a tough time with, groceries to buy, transportation and so on; nobody wants to take my money and school isn’t back in for another month. My employer is out of the country and doesn’t return my emails. What to …
“Reduplication, in linguistics, is a morphological process by which the root or stem of a word, or part of it, is repeated” (Wikipedia). You see reduplication in Chinese a lot, with verbs (看看, 试试), nouns (妈妈, 狗狗), and even adjectives (红红的, 漂漂亮亮).
You get reduplication is Japanese too (some of the coolest examples are mimetic), in words such as 時々 or 様々. As you can see, rather …
A while back I blogged about buying a PS2 in China, and there was a lot of interest. There’s not much to say about PS3, because it is so far uncracked/unpirated, so everyone who plays PS3 here imports everything. Games are 2-300 RMB each. XBox 360 has similar status re: pirating to Wii in China, but I have almost no experience with it, so will limit my observations to the Wii and its games.
Nintendo does not officially sell …
Despite the fantastical title, this is a blog post about translating into Chinese. Bear with me here.
Although she recognizes its importance, my wife has never been very enthusiastic about studying English, so over the years I’ve tried various ways of encouraging her to study. One of the earliest ideas I had was the TV show Friends. Tons of young Chinese people love it as study material, and ever since my teaching years in Hangzhou, I’ve always felt it’s …
I’ve been feeling guilty for a month for not saying something about John DeFrancis’s passing. I have have no words more eloquent or meaningful than these three, however:
Not surprisingly, I especially liked (and identified with) Brendan’s. If you don’t know DeFrancis and you’re at all interested in Chinese, by all means, check out the man’s work.
I’m …
John has lived in China for
12.7
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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