Two blog posts and a newspaper article that I read today and felt like passing on:

Down with your bourgeois, western holidays!
I was going to blog this myself, but the always readable Granite Studio beat me to it. I can't add much to what Jeremiah has written:
Anyone know how to say "Grinch" in Chinese?

I am aware of the dangers of cultural imperialism...but I'm not sure that if YJ and I take down our Christmas lights in the living room the neighborhood children are going to take notice, go home, and start reciting the Lun Yu. I mean it's not like a couple of Bible stories and a few Western religious images could incite someone to go on a holy crusade, lead an army to conquer half the country and then establish a pseudo-Christian theocracy that would bring the central government to its knees...okay, maybe that was a bad example.
Have a read.

Can't catch a break dept.
Sometimes I love Google. Sometimes I think they're a strange and sinister force that must be stopped. And sometimes they simply confuse me. Danwei's translation powerhouse, Joel Martinsen (a regular commenter on this site) picks up a Tianya forum and Southern Weekend story on an unfortunate idiosyncrasy of Google's translation engine:
You're playing with the Google English-Chinese translation beta, and like any curious individual, you start trying out some dirty language. So you enter "I thought this was fucking shit" and out comes "我认为这是中国运动员拉屎" (I think this is Chinese athlete shit.) Hmmm.

Then there's "i thought this was shame" which ends up "我认为这是中国的耻辱" (I think this is China's shame), and "i thought this was fucking" which becomes "我认为这是中国运动员", (I think this is Chinese athlete).

The post also includes a flack quote from Google's PR agency:

Google's Ogilvy PR representative explained that the errors were due to the way Google's statistical machine translation operates: it analyzes corresponding words and phrases in a huge pool of bilingual documents to determine the most likely translation. Documents related to international affairs get translated correctly, he said (the inference being that since "fucking" is unlikely to be found in many of the documents in Google's translation database, the translator did not have much data to work with).

The rep also ruled out programmer mischief, saying that human interference "did not exist and could not possibly occur."
"Could not possibly occur" --a categorical denial if ever there was one-- is one of those unfortunate phrases that have a way of coming back to haunt PR people. Anyone who thinks that Google can't be gamed hasn't paid much attention to the Internet. Still, you have to admire the optimism.

The trouble with investigative journalists
Geoffrey Fowler and Jason Dean of the Wall Street Journal have written an interesting story on the rise and subsequent miseries of investigative journalists in China. It's behind the WSJ paywall, but if you have access, it's worth a read:
As muckraking stirred up public angst, government officials grew frustrated. "The central government is using the media as a watchdog," says Li Xiguang, executive dean at the School of Journalism and Communication at Tsinghua University. But officials are also "very much worried about mistrust of the public toward the government."

In particular, the increasingly freewheeling media were criticized by some outside the government for shoddy journalistic practices. "Commercial pressure seeks readers, and people love negative news," Mr. Li says.

Such criticism resonated with the administration of President Hu Jintao, who has made building a "harmonious society" a big priority since he took office in 2003. Last fall, the government stepped up its curbs on the Internet and fired or censured several prominent editors. The central government also issued a guideline calling for an end to "cross-regional supervision" reporting.

When Southern Weekend's top editor heard the news, he held a somber staff meeting. "Everyone felt helpless," says Ruichun Yang, at the time Southern Weekend's page-one editor, who adds: "If yidi jiandu ends, so does watchdog journalism." Soon after, three of the weekly's front-page stories were yanked before they went to press, says Ms. Yang.

The guidance against yidi jiandu doesn't yet constitute Chinese law, and Southern Weekend still sends its staff to report in other provinces. But editors think twice now before doing so. Today as many as one in five of Southern Weekend's big stories end up getting axed, and many more ideas are killed before they're even reported, Ms. Yang says.

Officials at Nanfang Daily Group, Southern Weekend's owner, didn't respond to a request for an interview.

More at wsj.com.