Taplin's blog

There are few days when I check out BoingBoing and *don't* find something that sends my mind off in interesting directions. Last week, BoingBoing pointed its linky finger at John Taplin's blog. Since then, I've been devouring Taplin's back-catalogue. I've deliberately stayed away from finding out much about who he is. I'm enjoying taking his words for what they are, unencumbered by his resumé. In addition to lucid, polymath analysis, he's got some of the most compelling data graphics I've seen for a while. Two recent favorites, on the sad state of the US current account deficit and the sad state of the music industry, respectively. ..

A little more Chinglish

After yesterday's post, I dug back into my BoingBoing backlog, vaguely recalling this: ..

Putting the "doing it" in "to do"

As a resident of China during its long road to internationalisation, I adore this story. Courtesy of Lawrence Wilkinson. As the 2008 Olympics approach, the Chinese government has dispatched teams of linguists to clean up "Chinglish" signs all over Beijing... It seems that the f-word has cropped up in many signs in a way that has government officials as baffled as expats are amused. Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese at Penn believes that he's discovered the culprit: a translation program that (mis)translates the Chinese "gan," (meaning "dry" or "to do") as that most notorious word in the English language. For a full explanation -- and some hilarious, but decidedly M-rated photo examples of the mistranslations -- see Dr. Mair's post at: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/005195.html (scroll down for most of the photos). ..