A respected research institute wanted Chinese classical texts to adorn its journal, something beautiful and elegant, to illustrate a special report on China. Instead, it got a racy flyer extolling the lusty details of stripping housewives in a brothel.
Chinese characters look dramatic and beautiful, and have a powerful visual impact, but make sure you get the meaning of the characters straight before jumping right in.
More silliness where that came from — read the rest on your own.
(HT to reader)
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Absolutely hilarious, people who don’t proofread deserve what they get. I mean how much would it have cost to go find any random Chinese person to look it over? Even if you didn’t want to hire a professional, maybe just ask a Chinese friend or head down to the local college and ask some Chinese students. I refuse to believe there are no Chinese people in Germany. That “sinologist” must be an incredible idiot, I don’t buy the fact that because Chinese is tonal you can’t distinguish between a poem and a prostitute advertisement. The lesson here: when you are just looking for the Chinese look, play it safe and use the most famous thing you can find, in this case the classics.
The English-language promo mag of the University of Helsinki made a story of teaching of Chinese in the university to time with the visit of the Rector to the Peking University with which it has an exchange and cooperation arrangement. The magazine requested some illustration material from the Dept of Asian Studies, which gave them a bunch of books to look and scan some nice Chinese language passages.
So it happened that the mag editors illustrated the story with a caption from a Taiwanese newspaper reporting Nixon’s visit to China. Nixon’s hosts were named as 共匪 in the headline (gongfei, kor. kongbi), that is, “commie bandits.” In their visit to Beijing in the late 1990s, the Helsinki University delegation presented a bunch of these mags to their hosts. Not surprisingly, Peking University was not so enthusiastic about the choice of the illustration, but I understand that Helsinki somehow managed to avoid a break in relations and explain with most sincere apologies that the intentions had been good but mag editor’s knowledge in Chinese nonexistent.
The Chinese should think twice though before laughing at the Max Planck Institute – I wonder how many Chinese are wondering around with T-shirts written in English with expressions like “Do me Tonight Baby” or “I’m a Hot Mama.” I like that slogan “I’m Illiterate.” Someone in Seoul ought to try selling shirts that say “I’m Illiterate” or “I can’t read this” – that would be awesome.
I think it’s hilarious that the article has that throw-away paragraph at the end talking about how Chinese is a tonal language, when the misunderstanding is taking place at a textual level. Obviously, some smartass at the Independant thought that the tonality of the language would make it difficult for people to distinguish between the tens of thousands of characters they use to represent the different meanings despite their sound. Blind foreigners commenting on blind foreigners (which would make me a blind foreigner commenting on blind foreigners commenting on…. whatever.)
They’re not wondering. Probably more like, wAndering…
Thanks, looks like I need one of those illiterate T-shirts. On the other hand, they might also be wondering what their shirt means as they wander around.
About the t-shirts, I’ve asked quite a few if they care what they mean, they don’t. Not only would no one anywhere around them know they were non-grammatical or vulgar, no one would care enough to read them. Deciphering each others shirts is just not a high priority for the Chinese.
A agree with adeline but not how s/he approaches it.
It is natural, even if it looks ugly to those to can read it, that people use unfamiliar writing systems to adorn things and make them look more sophisticated. I find it more annoying to see a Westerner collect examples of the misused and inappropriate English, though I guess that’s natural, too, if English is all you can read. The next time I have some Westerner talking all superior about how people don’t know what they’re saying with English (to the English speaker, that is, since to the non-English speaker it says “I”m cool”, like a White American says “I’m spiritual” with incorrect Chinese character tattoos.), I’ll mention how the research center that has produced more Nobel prize winners than any other institution on the planet just wanted something that looked like Chinese poetry. If they wanted Chinese poetry, they could have chosen a known poem, from a certain point in literary history, by a known poet, and the subject matter could have been something that relates, perhaps roundaboutly, to the center’s research, with an explanation and maybe a translation on the inside cover.
The reason they ended up with an ad for a brothel is because they didn’t care about the “poem” itself in the first place. If the Max Planck Institute can care more about looking sophisticated with exotic characters than about what the characters say, it’s only a matter of course that tshirt makers in East Asia are going to do the same.
Personally, I think it may be a very clever and deliberate prank. This may be a sign of the dawning of an unanticipated Golden Age of German humor.
*cue in here “Thus Spake Zarathushtra” by Strauss*
. . . but I thought it *was* a very good poem about housewives.
What is ironic is that none of the anti-cnn Chinese trolls that gleefully joked about this could understand the math inside the book. Maybe they should stick to lambasting CNN.
I nominate the Max Planck institute as a top candidate for next year’s Ig Nobel Prize.
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