Timely Snow

This article provides an interesting example of the limitations of the “universality” of Chinese characters. Look at the picture; as the article notes

The characters read “You Are No. 1!”

That’s not a translation: the Cantonese pronunciation of the characters 腰呀冧吧温! (“yiu a nam ba wan!”) approximates the English sentence.

The problem for the mainland media is that most people aren’t familiar with Cantonese pronunciation, so they have no way to judge whether their interpretation is correct. The Beijing News, for example, misidentified the character 腰 as 绥, and the character 冧, which doesn’t exist in Mandarin, doesn’t show up on many newspaper websites.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 7:21 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.