Monday, August 29, 2011

You always know where you are with Chinese academics

Scraping the bottom of the barrel, that's where.

But at least it's reliably amusing.


The most recent selection of slapping-my-forehead-in-despair moments encountered in one of my editing jobs for a foreign policy think tank included the inevitable sequestering of all dangerous terms like democracy, human rights, and individualism within scare quotes, citing a Wikipedia article as justification for employing the neologism informatization, omitting the timeframes for half of the economic statistics quoted, leaving conspicuous evidence of rampant cutting & pasting in the haphazard variations in the type and size of fonts, and - oh, marvellous highlight! - listing as one of the features of the distinctively 'Asian political value system' (as opposed to all that nasty Western so-called "individualism").... intolerance.


Well, I assumed that was a typo by the authors - but maybe not?

1 comment:

JES said...

Haha. I suppose that could be considered a virtue if you somehow intended to imply impatience with imperfection. (Which, granted, no one with any actual familiarity with the language would do. Still...)

It reminds me, though, of the Griffith film. I wonder what the Chinese make of that? (Let alone Birth of a Nation.)