It isn’t just foreigners who goof up

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Yesterday I mentioned Justin Timberlake’s travails with a Chinese-language tattoo. But this afternoon I noticed something that reminded me it’s not just we foreigners who mess up Chinese characters. It was a promo for a television program that runs here every Saturday called More Than Words. It tracks down when and where characters are misused locally and explains the correct usage and pronunciation, sort of a video version of The Elements of Style.

Granted, the mistakes made by native speakers aren’t as ridiculous as a thuggish movie character with the Chinese phrase for “ice skating” on his arm. A photo on the More Than Words homepage shows a sign outside a restaurant that serves food from Chaozhou, a city near Hong Kong. But a miswritten character makes the city a “continent.” It’s an easy goof, along the lines of writing “their” for “there,” which I’ve probably done somewhere on this blog.

But in China characters are taken very seriously. When Xinhua, the state news service, distributed a story with an incorrect character in President Hu Jintao’s name last year, it was reportedly the cause for reprimands and an emergency meeting. News of the goof was carried widely in the Chinese press. The names of recent U.S. presidents have been pretty easy to spell, but I can’t think of a similar hubbub when someone in the American press flubbed the tricky first names of Madeleine Albright or Condoleezza Rice.

–Austin Ramzy