Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Why is the US media so afraid of Chinese words?

Daniel A Bell, the China professor at Tsinghua University, had a golden opportunity, I claim, to break through the wall of ignorance about China and to inform the US public, which still believes that learning a foreign language is a character flaw, or even a job killer, about the most important Chinese key terminologies in political theory. You know. The names the Chinese gave to their political ideas, movements, and brands.

But no! This is The New York Times. In here we use clean and pure English, the only language that matters in the world.

If you disagree, well, you won't get published. Not in journals, not in magazines, and certainly not in The New York Times which practices Orwellian Rules of Writing -meaning that its writers will avoid foreign words and find English replacement for them.

Remember the stories from the old days in America when colored people were not supposed to sit in a public bus together with whites because it looked so unpleasant to the white man's eyes?  Well, same with words: if they are foreign, that means they also look unpleasant to the white man's eyes. No differences. Same prejudices.

I love it when stupid Americans tell me that New York is so multicultural, when in fact it is full of Americans. America may have fought for racial equality, but they are intolerant toward those foreign terms. Avoid foreign words. Write English.

Imagine an op-ed article in The Times sprinkled with Hexie Shehui, Si Ge Quan Mian, or Zhongguo Meng. Those editors would feel insulted. Do you expect us to look this shit up in a dictionary? Yes, because it is Chinese. But I don't know Chinese. Exactly. So keep that in mind when writing a piece on a people who don't quite yet understand. Otherwise, if he simple used English words for Chinese ideas, the piece would read like the usual NY Times report: talking down on them as if a viceroy explaing

Isn't the world insulting to Americans? All those crazy languages. And we forbid them in our classrooms, papers, publishers, and academia. No big deal. If you have a great idea, I will find an appropriate English name for it. This will make it easier for me to define your idea for our audiences. Yes, I stole your idea, basically. But, hey, there's no such things as intellectual property theft in China, right? Anyway, we Westerners do this for the last 350 years: translating Chinese words into what we already know.
No wonder that nobody in American wants to study a foreign language any more. It's like a handicap in the professional world. Yes, you can talk to Chinese in the streets, but not use Chinese words in your writing career. It's worse than racism.

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