From state media:

A recent online survey showed that over 80 percent of Chinese people are opposed to setting the translation of China’s capital city as “Peking.” Instead, they favor the standard Chinese spelling of “Beijing.”

The survey, initiated by the China Youth Daily in association with Web site sina.com.cn, features questions about various phenomena in the usage of Romanized Chinese words, or Pinyin.

Fair enough, I suppose, though this would seem a non-issue. Aside from names like Peking Duck, Peking University and Peking Opera (whose name has brewed its own equally inane controversy in the past) , which predated the creation of the pinyin system, who on Earth still says Peking instead of Beijing? (Aside from the French, that is. And the Germans.) Still, I’m guessing that this means 20% of Chinese people still like “Peking,” (which would be truly bizarre - I wonder if even 20% of English-speakers would use that name these days) or - far more likely - couldn’t care less.

While it (perhaps intentionally) isn’t made clear whether this means Chinese people would like “standard” Chinese names applied universally across the globe or just on the street signs in their own cities (though here again, the Beijing/Peking dispute would make little sense - here in Shanghai we have Tibet Road and not Xizang Lu, but Beijing Road instead of Peking Road), the article’s author decides to let other unnamed “experts” speak for them:

Some experts have pointed out that “only by preserving its own cultural traditions and nationalism in international communication can a nation speak to the world in an equal voice.”

No word yet on whether New Yorkers prefer “New York” over “Niu Yue.”

The Chinese-English language barrier has allowed innovative companies to carve out niches in the language learning market. The arbitrage of English and Chinese, in particular, can be a lucrative practise.

One company that’s been doing this for awhile is Praxis, which runs Chinesepod out of Shanghai. Chinesepod is a podcast and website that teaches users Chinese. The podcast is free, but users pay a subscription fee for extra services. Fees start at US$9 a month for the basic package, which includes access to PDFs of dialogues, to US$200 for a year with all the bells and whistles, which includes daily practice phone calls from a Chinesepod staff member.

I’ve spoken to the Chinesepod team at their cool warehouse office near Xintiandi, and they say they’re profitable (but won’t disclose figures). They’re certainly enthusiastic about the possibilities of ‘language-casting’ (my shorthand for language learning podcasting… which is a mouthful) and have been chatting up partners and investors to expand their operations. (more…)

A column by Nick Currie (aka Momus, whom I’d only known of previously as a somewhat obscure electronic musician) on Wired.com makes an interesting analogy between airline routes and how language and culture flow across the world: Both either go directly from point to point or radiate outward like spokes from major “hubs”. Like in the airline industry, the trend in cultural communication up until now has been away from point-to-point and toward hub-and-spoke:

One of the articles to emerge from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization conference was, “Cultural Diversity? A Pipe Dream.” In it, Rüdiger Wischenbart noted some shocking facts about the current realities behind book translation.

Worldwide, he said, between 50 percent and 60 percent of all translations of books originate from English originals. It’s sometimes higher: 70 percent of all books translated into Serbian, for instance, have English originals. In return, only 3 percent to 6 percent of all worldwide book translations are from foreign languages into English. English speakers, it seems, are talking a lot but listening very little. If this were the airline industry, we’d be talking about the kind of world where you can’t fly from Moscow to Berlin without changing in London.

The statistics go on to cover English dominance in movies (only in the US and India do people regularly go to see movies made in their own country) and, finally, the internet. But in this last category there at least seems to be some competition (emphasis added):

What about the internet? Well, English is unsurprisingly the dominant language, with 29.5 percent of all users communicating in it. Chinese is next, with about half the number of English users (159 million Chinese to 329 million English users). But Chinese is coming up fast, with more than twice the growth rate of English online. If it overtakes, does that make English a point-to-point language, or does Chinese just become the new hub, with all the spokes (at least the Asian ones) leading toward it?

A good question, but I wonder how much of that growth rate is coming from native speakers, either Chinese citizens or overseas Chinese (137 million of those 159 million users are inside China, where internet use is growing at an 8% clip), and how much is from second-language speakers from elsewhere in Asia or the world - my guess is that it is overwhelmingly from the former, and that Chinese on the internet is on the whole a fairly self-contained system. However, with more people learning Chinese around the world and the recent trend toward translating the Chinese internet into English, we’ll probably see a few more spokes emerge.

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.

Joel Martinsen at the always informative Danwei.org has posted a few translated comments recently made by Kou Xiaowei, vice-director of the A/V and internet division of GAPP (General Administration of Press and Publications), taking back an earlier statement that there would be a “real-name” system imposed on online gaming, similar to other mandatory registration systems on the way for blogs, message boards, and online music and video sites. Actually, he didn’t so much take it back as outright deny that any such statement had ever been made. Danwei has more:

At last year’s conference, Kou Xiaowei had this to say:

A “real-name system” has three sub-systems: One, a registration system that discriminates according to ID information; Two, an inquiry system that is open to the community and can allow parents to check whether their children are playing games; Three, a confirmation system that has the cooperation of the PSB to confirm the registered information.
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A “real-name system” will definitely be written into law.

When it was floated last year, the “real name” system encountered resistance from adult gamers who resented being subject to the same rules and fatigue systems as minors. But with a few age-related changes, the identification portion of the anti-addiction system that Kou expects to be implemented industry-wide in April or May is basically identical to the one he spoke of last year.

As it turns out, the real denial isn’t that there will be a system requiring online gamers to submit their real names and identity numbers — that’s definitely going through — it’s that it won’t be called a “real name system” (实名制). You really have to admire the sheer chutzpah here, but while the government has shown an increased effort to inject PR into its message, it is light years behind its net-savvy citizens.

The People’s Daily yesterday reported the death of a senior Chinese official thus: “Liao Jingdan, a former Chinese revolutionary and long-time publicity official of the Communist Party of China (CPC), has passed away. He was 93.”

Publicist? It makes it sound as if, after a stint with the Communist Party, he resigned to take up a senior position with Hill & Knowlton. The word propaganda has had positive connotations and a specific and widely recognized meaning in the English version of Chinese communism for decades. Sad to see such a robust word filled with fighting spirit be toppled by a word redolent of wimpish passivity. Gongguan is not xuanchuan.