Danwei.org’s Joel Martinsen has a good roundup here of online chatter in the Chinese internet about the tragic massacre at Virginia Tech Monday, where over 30 died. Many comments, he says, are shocked and sympathetic, with some ugly venting here and there. He also includes an interesting excerpt from a CCTV reporter’s blog:

A journalist with a CCTV news program wrote on her blog that this possibility ultimately caused their report to be scrapped. She comments:

Instinct at the time was: not doing it would be unacceptable and a dereliction of duty. However, to do it might run into temporary restrictions, and it might even be killed before being born. Regardless, the first thing is to get going on it. This was the opinion of the editor in chief, and also that of us workers….Originally, the thought was to come up with a plan as quickly as possible and let the leaders pass a verdict on it, but something unexpected came up: the leaders quickly “became aware of the serious nature of the issue” and “stopped up a hole that could be problematic for propaganda.”

Meanwhile, Beijing Newspeak, a blog written by a foreign copy editor working at Xinhua, has a post here on the mood in his state newsroom as it was revealed that the gunman was a Korean permanent resident of the US, not a Chinese citizen, as had been reported earlier:

In the end, we will never know how they planned to approach it but suffice to say the senior editors were delighted when “South Korea” was read out at the press conference. Back-slapping and congratulations ensued - one editor said that it would have been a inconceivable loss of face if the gunman had been Chinese. Xinhua can now go forth and write about the incident all they want but there is no doubt that if the gunman had been Chinese the reporting would have been understated to say the least. Galling really. To think a potential loss of face dwarfed a sense of responsibility to report such a tragic world news event.

One major feature of the ‘China’ blogosphere is the divide between the Chinese and English-language parts of it. Readers who only read English risk having a blinkered view of what’s going on in China if they rely only on English-language blogs, and vice versa. That’s where bridge blogs come in. The bridge blog (as opposed to the ladder blog) connects the two sides of the language chasm, allowing information to flow. The problem is, translating posts accurately is a time-consuming and not particularly lucrative affair.

Enter Yeeyan. It’s a group blog that’s been translating posts from the English-language blogosphere to Chinese since December. Now the inevitable has happened: It’s started translating Chinese-language posts into English. This is a real boon for readers stuck in the English-language ghetto of the China blogosphere. Technology news is of particular interest to Yeeyaners(?), so I read with interest a translated post on US internet companies’ top 10 mistakes in China. According to China Web 2.0 Review, Yeeyan has done a good job in the English-Chinese translations, so we can only hope they do similarly well the other way round.

That’s not to say Yeeyan is the first attempt at bridge blogging. Plenty of other China bloggers have expended considerable effort in trying to close the language gap. Roland Soong’s ESWN is probably the best example of this. What Yeeyan has done is cast a wide net into the pool of bilingual bloggers, harnessing the collective abilities of this rare group instead of relying on bloggers’ individual efforts (another group translation effort by China bloggers like Soong is here). A translation on Yeeyan, for example, isn’t set in stone once it’s published. Readers can leave comments pointing out mistakes and the translator often makes changes based on those comments, improving the overall translation as more eyeballs ‘proofread’ it. The distributed nature of the translating and proofreading means accuracy and readability improves as more people participate, triggering a virtuous cycle — which is great for us Hanzi illiterates.