Backlash builds up in China against the English-language invasion

HONG KONG—A cultural backlash is building up in China against English, with critics claiming that a “national obsession” with learning it is corroding the “purity” of the Chinese language and downgrading non-English speakers to second-class citizen status.

The phenomenon, reminiscent of Mulayam Singh’s campaign in India last year to disincentivise English learning, has been escalated into a petition to top policy advisers to build linguistic defences against the “English invasion” of China. It enjoys support among sections of Chinese society, although legions of the Chinese see English education as a passport to career advancement.

The anti-English campaign reached a high point at last week’s meeting of China’s top policymakers in Beijing, when a proposal was presented for a ban on the use of common English abbreviations (like GDP and CEO) and even English names—of people, places and companies—in Chinese-language publications. The proposal was put forward by Huang Youyi, a leading publisher and chairman of the International Federation of Translators, who argues that the increasing invocation of English words and phrases in Chinese language publications could endanger the future of Chinese.

Huang criticises popular perception that “using foreign words is a sign of being open-minded and international”. Instead, he says, the Chinese “should have confidence in our own language... You cannot expect others to respect you unless you respect yourself.” If measures were not taken to “stop Chinese mingling with English,” Chinese would “no longer be a pure language in a few years.”

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Acclaimed translator says literary translation about fidelity and feel

NEW YORK—If you’re a fan of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or have purchased the latest edition of Don Quixote, you might know the name Edith Grossman.

You would have seen her listed on the cover of Don Quixote, right under author Miguel de Cervantes, or recognized her from Love in the Time of Cholera and other Garcia Marquez books. You’d be happy to know that she is well compensated, highly regarded and in steady demand.

It’s a good life for any writer, but it’s especially charmed for the art form Grossman has mastered: translation.

An ancient and invaluable profession, the passport for a given culture’s journey abroad, translation has been practised by literary greats such as Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound and Saul Bellow. Some of the most famous phrases in English, from “Of arms and the man I sing” to “Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” are translations.

But the typical translator’s status can be likened to a ghost writer’s—an appendage obscure and underpaid. Like ghost writers, they often receive flat fees and no royalties. Reviewers often overlook them or faintly praise them—and this drives Grossman crazy—for “ably” translating the original text.

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Media need multiple platforms, revenue streams to thrive

NEW YORK (Agence France-Presse)—Multiple platforms and revenue streams are going to be key for media industry players hoping to survive and thrive in the fast-changing digital landscape, top media executives said here recently.

With advertising revenue eroding and free content abundant, media companies are going to need to adapt their strategies to the new environment ushered in by the Internet, they said at the Bloomberg BusinessWeek 2010 Media Summit.

“The brand has to transcend all of the different platforms,” said Renee Plato, the vice president of digital video distribution at Walt Disney Co., whose properties include the ABC television network and sports giant ESPN.

“Our main goal is to reach the fans wherever they are on the best available screen,” Plato said, whether that be on mobile screens, computer screens or TV screens.

“Perhaps there’s a way that consumers are paying for that access, that convenience, and perhaps not,” she said.

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TOEIC test chosen for English assessment of Shanghai World Expo volunteers

PRINCETON, NJ (Marketwire)—This May, nearly 70 million people will attend the World Expo in Shanghai, China, an event that requires thousands of English-speaking volunteers to provide information to visitors. Having received an overwhelming 600,000 applications for the available positions, World Expo organizers chose the TOEIC Test by Educational Testing Service (ETS) as a tool to assess the English-language proficiency of volunteer applicants.

In a January interview with CHO, Tao Shenxian, Vice Director of the Shanghai World Expo Coordination Bureau Training Centre, commented on the process of screening such a large pool of applicants: “The first step was to decide on an appropriate language proficiency assessment tool, and we soon realized that the ETS TOEIC method would well and truly satisfy the requirements of the Expo for the assessment of vocational language capabilities.”

After reviewing several language assessment tools from a number of worldwide institutions, World Expo organizers chose the TOEIC test because it met all of their needs. These included broad accessibility, wide acceptance and high standards of quality and fairness.

“We are excited to work with the Shanghai World Expo to provide a high-quality assessment that will assist in the screening of this year's volunteers," said Enghan Tan, China Country Manager for ETS Global.

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Boys read as much as girls but prefer the simpler books, survey shows

First the good news: boys are reading as much as girls. Now the bad: the books they choose are far less challenging and easier to comprehend than those selected by girls, and this gets worse as they grow older.

The findings of a major study of 100,000 children's reading habits coincide with national curriculum test results which show that – at all ages – girls score more highly on reading tests. “Boys are clearly reading nearly as much as girls, a finding that may surprise some onlookers,” said Professor Keith Topping, of the University of Dundee’s school of education, who headed the study. “But boys are tending to read easier books than girls. The general picture was of girls reading books of a consistently more difficult level than boys in the same year.”

The gap in the standard of their reading habits becomes most marked between the ages of 13 and 16, the report says. The favourite girl’s book in this age group is Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer, the first in the vampire romance series that has sold 85 million copies worldwide. This was ranked far more difficult to read than the boys’ favourite, The Dark Never Hides, from the British novelist Peter Lancett's Dark Man series, illustrated fantasy novels aimed at reluctant teens and young adults struggling to read.

The study notes that both sexes tend to choose books that are easier to read once they reach the age of 11 and transfer to secondary school. Compared with a similar study two years ago, the Harry Potter author JK Rowling has tumbled down the top 10 most popular children’s authors, from second to ninth place.

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Breaking down language barriers on the web

The Internet is rapidly expanding around the world, with thousands of non-English web pages being added daily.

The number of non-English websites is expected to grow as the web opens up to more people across the world and domain names expand to include native character sets.

In late 2009, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved the creation of internet addresses containing non-Latin characters.

The web provides billions of people with information, across a range of different languages. According to Internet World Stats (http://www.internetworldstats.com) in September 2009, the total number of English internet users made up only 27.6 percent of internet users around the world. Chinese language users followed closely behind with 22.1 percent.

Internet users speaking Spanish, Japanese, French, Portuguese, German, Arabic, Russian and Korean were in the top ten most used languages on the web.

Google introduced a new beta version of their Chrome web browser for Windows users on March 1 hoping to bridge the widening internet language gap and “make the world’s information universally accessible in an easy, frictionless way.”

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Scholar analyzes South Asia English

GIESSEN, Germany—English as spoken in South Asia is evolving, but there is no sign it is turning into a separate dialect that English speakers from other continents might not understand, according to Joybrato Mukherjee, a top German linguistics scholar.

The University of Giessen professor uses computer analysis, based on one-million-word samples of Indian and five other South Asian varieties of English, to discover their distinctive words as well as slight regional differences in grammar.

English spread around the globe with the British Empire. Linguists say there is no authoritative standard English. All the spinoffs exist side by side and are “right” for the people who speak them. English in India functions a little differently from English in England. Take the word, “prepone,” the opposite of postpone, which most other English speakers have never heard of.

“In British English you would have to say ‘bring forward in time’,” explained Mukherjee, who is of Indian origin.

“It shows Indian English speakers approach this very analytically. They use the prefix ‘pre’ and combine it with ‘pone.’ Actually, the question should be why there isn't any word 'prepone' in British English. It would be much easier,” he said. “Native languages are much more historically conditioned, whereas it's generally a tendency among post-colonial varieties that speakers handle their second language much more rationally.

“There are, for example, in Indian English lots and lots of words that end in -ee, like rewardee – the one who gets a reward – which is uncommon in British English, but very common in Indian English.”

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Colleges test Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader as study tool

Even before Apple announced the iPad, higher-education technologists predicted that e-book readers were on the brink of becoming a common accessory among college students; last fall, two-thirds of campus CIOs said they believed e-readers would become an "important platform for instructional resources" within five years, according to the Campus Computing Project.

Now, as several major universities finish analyzing data from pilot programs involving the latest version of the Amazon Kindle, officials are learning more about what students want out of their e-reader tablets. Generally, the colleges found that students missed some of the old-fashioned note-taking tools they enjoyed before. But they also noted that the shift had some key environmental benefits. Further, a minority of students embraced the Kindle fairly quickly as highly desirable for curricular use.

If one clear consensus emerged from the studies that have been finalized at Princeton University, Case Western Reserve University and the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, it is this: For students who were given the Kindle DX and tried to use it for coursework, the inability to easily highlight text was the biggest lowlight of the experience.

"Because it was difficult to take notes on the Kindle, because PDF documents could not be annotated or highlighted at all, and because it was hard to look at more than one document at once, the Kindle was occasionally a tool that was counter-productive to scholarship," Princeton researchers wrote in a summary of their study, released Monday.

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