Mondays always make me crabby and prone to complaint, and today is no exception. I've just cleaned up the English in an event report that will be going out to a client later. In that report I stumbled across the word "informationalization". A half hour later, when I sent the report back to the young man who had drafted it, that word was, to my shame, still there.

This word --and its variations-- is one of the curses of doing technology related PR work in China. Every technology or technology-related client that we have uses it regularly. "Informationalization" or "informatization" (there is no consensus on this) refers to the modernization of China's IT infrastructure, which is part of the National Agenda. The reason why our clients cannot escape this word is that foreign companies (and, of course, successful Chinese ones) all have to be seen to support the National Agenda. Upgrading China's IT infrastructure is a key part of upgrading China's industry to be globally competitive and promoting Domestic Innovation, which are a big parts of the 11th Five Year Plan, which is essentially the enshrinement of the current revision of the National Agenda. Therefore, all our clients are talking about "informationalization", and they have been since I arrived and probably long before.

I hate this word. It's fake and inelegant. When I say it, it grates across my palate like a mouthful of gravel. It pollutes the documents that I painstakingly pick free of jargon lice like a grooming chimp. It trashes my resolve to only use real words in written communication*. It is a demonstration of both the adaptability and elegance of the Chinese language, and of the large truth that some Chinese words simply don't translate elegantly into English.

For Imagethief readers who don't speak Chinese, "informationalization" is a direct translation of the perfectly acceptable Chinese word "信息化", or xinxihua. "信息" (xinxi) means information, and "化" (hua) means change or transformation. 化 is a lovely word with many fine uses. In addition to being an often-used compound, it fills roles in the Chinese language similar to the English suffixes -fy and -ize. Sometimes this works out great from a translation point of view, such as with "液化" (liquefy = liquid + tranformation) or "现代化" (modernize = modern + transformation). The Chinese aren't big on differentiating the noun and verb forms of these words, so "化" also gets used for the -fication and -ization versions of these words as well, as in "四个现代化", or the "Four Modernizations" of late '70s propaganda yore.

Unfortunately, sometimes "化" works out badly from a translation point of view, as with "informatize" or "informatization" or "informationalization".

Since I first encountered this word and its variations, I've been trying to think of a suitable, single English word that I can replace it with. Unfortunately, there just doesn't seem to be one. So I'm stuck with it. The closest I can get is a cloud of uninspiring, jargony-sounding two-word phrases such as "IT upgrading", "technology transformation" and such. I might as well mail journalists a syringe of morphine. In general the better approach seems to be more fully realized phrases, such as the one I used in the second paragraph, above ("the modernization of China's IT infrastructure" for those who have forgotten already).

Sadly, these sacrifice the snappy, sum-it-all-up insouciance that makes single-word distillations so effective in propaganda and, yes, PR. After all, would the ungrammatical but zippy "Three Represents" have got as far as it did if it had been "The Three Concepts that the Communist Party Represents in Chinese Society"? I think not. Try getting all that on a big-character banner.

*This is in stark opposition to my policy of using a treasure-trove of made-up words in spoken communication.

Note: This is also CNET Asia post 30.

  Informationalization! Someday it will all lead to this.
  From Stefan Landsberger, as usual. Plus, is it me, or does the cat look worried?