Imagethief

I'll defer to Imagethief's PR expertise to confirm or refute this, but doesn't this paragraph in the Forbes article

<blockquote>

A Valentine's card sent by the Foreign Ministry would read something like this: "Dear Country X, We have enjoyed a deepening strategic partnership of cooperation in recent months and have reached consensus on a number of issues. We should hold hands and strive to take the bilateral relations to new heights in order to create a mutually beneficial, win-win situation."

</blockquote>

sound heart-warmingly familiar? Not at all unlike the cotton candy that gets spun out of corporate PR departments? For "country" just substitute "business."

Not that I would possibly be thinking of my own enormous, governmentish place of employment...

While I agree that the Party has made great contributions to the art form, they're hardly the only practitioners. It brings to mind the popular dot-com era game of "bullshit bingo", in which cards made up before long meetings would have their squares filled in with "synergy", "eyeballs", "win-win", and the like.

Come to think of it, though, the vapidity and repetition are probably on a different plane in Beijing. Splittist? Closenesses?! The bingo game at the 17th Congress would have been fast and furious.

I had similar experience. I am a translator, so I met many documents from the government orgnization. Quite funny, the job always requires us not to translate subject to what the documents are talking about. Someday a guy from a state-owned company diliver an honor certificate to have translated. It begun with ××同志（Comrade ××）. This guy insisted that it couldn't be translated in this way, because this word has a sense of communism. It's ridiculous. In a communist country, but the system only boasts the "advantages of socialist" and deliberately avoids to mention the word of communism in front of foreign media.

@will Haha, we translated it into MR. which the guy insisted to use.

I work as a Chinese->English translator and Chinese<>English interpreter in Australia, and as a Chinese from Malaysia, I'm often wildly bewildered and frustrated by official speeches coming out of China. The speeches are often full of useless 官话(puffed-up official gobbledygook) and 套话(polite, but often insincere niceties).

As a former translating & interpreting student,  I often had to gnash my teeth, bang my head against the wall to make any sense out of these speeches, but thankfully, I don't have to deal with them in my current daily jobs.  Believe me, trying to translate or interpret a Mainland official speech into meaningful and sensible English can be a near death experience, and I'd rather eat belacan(pungent South-East Asian prawn paste) spiked with the most obnoxious Parmesan cheese than to translate or to interpret Mainland 官话.

The following link points to an interesting opinion essay published in the People's Daily recently.

http://opinion.people.com.cn/GB/60832/6824280.html

It is about a Chongqing official who dutifully started off a pompous speech and was abruptly cut off by his impatient senior who snarled at him to "Just cut the claptrap and get on with the vital bits!"

I still have enormous trouble trying to figure out how to translate a favorite Mainland trendy word - 市场化. To translate it literally as 'marketization' just doesn't sound like sensible English in most situations. 'Marketization' isn't even a proper word in some dictionaries but Mainland Chinese->English translators are using it without a second thought. New catchwords and phrases coming out from the Mainland have certainly 'disharmonized' a whole bunch of us living in the West in a literal sense.

P.S. Damn you Will... I spent hours recently going over your miscellaneous writing - in particular the section re your doomed computer game business venture in S'pore. I had heaps of fun reading it nonetheless. :)

Oh man, that ubiquitous 'hua4' - 化 simply drives me bananas whenever I see it being conveniently adapted to turn a Chinese noun into a verb with mindless relish in the modern Mainland lexicon. In the right context, it can be used elegantly but that word has been overused, mostly in a lazy way. It might be vogue but it ain't, comrades!

On the flip side, most Chinese who are under 35 y/o aren't aware of the pollution of the Chinese language from Western lexicons. For instance just yesterday, I read a Chinese article in the Xinhuanet titled "Exposing the fault line between the elites and the grass roots." and guess what - the author used the term 草根 which is a literal translation for grass roots instead of the long accepted 基层.  ARRRGGGHHH !

I still have nightmares reminiscing my frequent queries directed at one of my English->Chinese translation teachers re polluted Chinese terms and phrases; and argument on meaning-based rather word-based translations. (I failed to get a professional accreditation in that course).

Sorry, what I meant was '.... It might be in vogue but it ain't elegant....'

You can verb anything.

The upside of the "Englishization" of Chinese, Wuey, is that it makes Chinese much easier for native English speakers. Of course, in the case of 草根, the meaning seems to have been skewed a bit... in Hong Kong, 草根階層 seems to translate to something more like "the working class," whereas in English a "grassroots movement" means something more like a broad-based citizen effort.

Thanks, Will! If Nina keeps putting in the evening shifts at the Andingmen textile factory, I should be ok for the time being ...