Piracy? In China? You must be kidding. In October 2012, the Ministries of Finance and Education jointly announced that they would provide free Xinhua dictionaries to students, with the bundles of joy arriving at the desks of many rural students at the start of the spring semester in 2013.
However, a CCTV investigation found that the dictionaries sent to schools in many provinces including Hubei, Yunnan, Hebei, and Heilongjiang were in fact pirated, and featured many mistakes. One example of these fluff-ups was the misspelling of “what” as “uhat”, and for the Chinese-speaking readers among us, Chinese character mishaps included “话把儿” (handle) being written as “活把儿” (the first character “hua” being mistakenly replaced with “huo”).
Madness.
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Keywords: Chinglish piracy in China Xinhua dictionaries
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Instead of books, clearly buying legal copies is difficult, they should hire and send native speakers to live in these rural areas. Many young people would love to explore the Chinese countryside. With few responsibilities back home they would be perfect to teach. Especially young adults from EU and US. Very few jobs available, send them somewhere for work experience. Chinese government already sends tons of their children to our homes, lets return the favor (no sarcasm included).
May 07, 2013 20:30 Report Abuse