Lost in translation, all 8,000 characters of it
The New York Times getting it wrong? Preposterous notion, right? And so I thought also – until reading this story recently.
The story is by now so well known that it’s featured on Wikipedia. A Chinese woman called Ma Cheng has a given name which uses an unusual character, which is visually composed of three repetitions of the character for “horse”. This character was recorded in a 1710 AD character dictionary as a variant form of a character meaning “gallop”. This variant form has fallen out of use over the last 300 years, and today is only found in comprehensive character dictionaries, with the 1710 publication being the most recent source. For a rough analogy, imagine having a þ in your name.
As might be expected, having an obsolete character in her name has caused Ms Ma some difficulty over the years. For one thing, modern type sets and computer character sets rarely feature the character. In earlier years, authorities would write-in the character “”cheng”” by hand on documents such as ID cards. However, with the conversion towards full digitisation, it is becoming more and more difficult to solve the problem.
A quirky story so far, but not too far out of the ordinary. The NY Times report takes a turn torwards the dark alley of dystopia, however, when it turns towards what it claimed was an 8,000 list of permissible characters. The Chinese government, it said, citing a Chinese newspaper report, had been developing this list in recent years, not just for standardising naming use, but for ordinary usage as well. A Chinese linguistics official was quoted, via the state mouthpiece Xinhua, as saying that 8,000 characters (compared to the 85,000 in existence, and the roughly 30,000 in ordinary or literary usage) was ‘enough to convey most concepts’. Disturbing whiffs of doublespeak, newspeak, and the Thought Police?
I certainly thought it sounded just a little too shockingly Orwellian. So I went digging a little. The NY Times referenced two other sources for the statements about the 8,000-character “permissible word list”: a Xinhua news piece which it linked to, and a report from “another Chinese newspaper”.
First up, the Xinhua report. Headline? “Official refutes report that China will limit number of characters for new names“. Quite the opposite to the “limiting language to 8,000 characters” claim, it seems.
So how did this all come about? The Xinhua article cites – and refutes – a report by the Guangzhou-based Yangcheng Evening News that claimed that baby names would be limited to an 8,000 character list. It also offers another clue: an 8,000-character list of simplified characters, which a government official says “in combination, could convey almost any concept in any field”. So is it true? Is the Communist government embarking on a campaign to control thought by limiting the tools of thought?
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