Bad Characters

It is bad enough that Chinese-speaking citizens cannot always get ballots in their language. It is worse that they must contend with poorly translated election materials. But it is incomprehensible that translated ballots would list Democrats as Republicans and Republicans as Democrats!

Yet that is exactly what happened in the November 2000 election in New York. At six voting sites in Flushing, Queens, party labels for all state races were reversed on the Chinese-language ballots. And that is simply the most egregious error. Others include voting instructions so carelessly translated they could not be understood, characters printed so small they could not be read, and directions that said one thing in English and another in Chinese.

How could such glaring mistakes occur? They occurred because the New York City Board of Elections does not use qualified, competent translators. It sends election materials to translation companies and does not properly proofread the materials when they are returned. The elections office does not have a Chinese language proofreader on staff, but simply asks employees “who are Asian” to look over the materials. These employees do not necessarily speak Chinese well, and they are certainly not professional proofreaders.

The result is confusion and frustration among Chinese voters. Worse, it is disenfranchisement of some. And worse still, the careless attitude toward accurate translation tells Chinese Americans that their voice does not matter.

Links:

• Chinatown Ballot Shows ‘Republican’ as ‘Democrat’
  Voters Face Bad Translations, Conflicting Instructions
• Elections - Lost in Translation?

It’s very easy to get tattoo symbols from books or the Internet. Whether they are correct or appropriate is another question. We feel that people who sell tattoo art without providing warnings are just out to make a quick buck and don’t care about you.

Sometimes bad Chinese names are just comical, but other times they can be downright offensive to the very customers you are trying to reach. Careless translations send the message that you don’t really care about your customers. If you don’t care about them, why should they care about you?

Because China will soon be the biggest consumer market, many businesses are looking to add potential customers by marketing their business and services there. In trying to cut costs, companies sometimes hire uncertified people to translate their business name. Not a wise choice in the business world. Bad Chinese names have cost companies dearly.

We have seen so many unfortunate cases of people getting embarrassing permanent symbols on their bodies. We obviously have no control over how our characters will be used, but we strongly discourage customers from having them tattooed.

See the link below for issues related to tattooing Chinese symbols.

http://goodcharacters.com/a-word-about-tattoos.html

Toyota announced in June 2004 that it was updating the Chinese pinyin of the name of its luxury model Lexus from the well-known Ling-Zhi to the new Lei-Ke-Sa-Si. Many wondered why.

The new name Lei-Ke-Sa-Si, on the other hand, hints at no nobility, speed, or luxury. Instead it shares two characters with Ke-Lai-Si-Le, Chrysler’s Chinese name. Chrysler is positioned lower than Lexus, in the near-luxury category. If someone tries to be funny, Lei-Ke-Sa-Si can mean “thunder overcomes SARS” since, literally, Lei is thunder, Ke is to overcome, and Sa-Si sound like SARS. Why would Toyota choose such a name for Lexus?

http://goodcharacters.com/newsletters/thunder.overcomes.sars.html

Nissan’s Bluebird (sedan) is translated as Lan-Niao in Chinese. In Mandarin, lan means blue and niao means bird-no problem. However, the reading of the characters for lan niao in the Minnan (Hokkien-Taiwanese) is lan jiao, which also sounds like the word for male genitals. It’s rather complicated, but although blue in Minnan is lan and bird is jiao, the term lan jiao is bad, to put it mildly.

http://goodcharacters.com/newsletters/0404.nissan.bluebird.html