Let’s Get It Right

Let’s Get It Right (Orininally published by Beijing Review - www.bjreview.com.cn)
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By LISA CARDUCCI

I recently wrote to the CCTV English channel to congratulate them on the high quality of their programs, such as Dialogue, but also to voice my concern about something that I find most disturbing.

I asked the question: How would you react if China decided to call itself “Asia” or if India changed its name to “Asia?” There is no need to answer this. We all know it would be wrong because Asia is a continent, not a country, and, as Chinese and Asians yourselves, you would feel frustrated. That’s perfectly understandable, I said in my letter.

But, can you understand that people from Canada (like myself), Mexico, Haiti, Jamaica, Brazil, Colombia Bolivia, Argentine, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay, also feel offended when people use the name of “our” continent to describe U.S. citizens? Another point is that as the U.S. politics and presidency are not always praised by every other American, we, Americans who are not from the United States, would appreciate not to have the term American confused with the United States.

If people living in the United States have not been able to create a word to describe themselves (such as Canadians, Chileans or Mexicans), that’s their problem. Let them deal with it.

May I also remind you, I said, that when you use the term “American dollar” it includes the Canadian dollar? Obviously this is not what is meant, but then why call the U.S. dollar an American dollar in the first place?

My next point was to indicate to CCTV that they need to keep in mind that English listeners are not all from the United States. When news programs announce that Tianjin is 90 miles from Beijing, I, as a Canadian, need a calculator to estimate how far it is. Only the United States does not use the metric system. Why should CCTV help them to make it difficult for others?

This happens not only in English TV programs. In China, English language is “the” foreign language. Speaking waiyu means speaking English. When a foreigner fills a form in China, he/she is asked to write his/her “English name.” I wonder what an Arab person may write on that line. What the Chinese authorities don’t want there is Greek, Arabic, Cyrillic, Persian, Korean, Japanese, Tibetan, Naxi and Mongolian characters or letters, but something they can read, Latin letters. The question should then be “Name (in Latin alphabet).” I could then sign my Italian name directly in the Latin alphabet, and my Russian, Tibetan and Japanese friends could write the transliteration of their original name into the Latin alphabet.

In the same vein, two related issues need to be raised. First, it was correct to use the term RMB (renminbi means money of local people) when FEC (Foreign Exchange Certificates) were still used. These certificates, however, have not been in operation since 1994. Currently there is only one currency in China which is the Chinese yuan (CNY). The second issue is 50.3 yuan should not be translated into 50 dollars and 30 cents, as is the case when the women call out the monetary balance of your IP telephone card.

Finally, if nations of Britain, Australia, South Africa, the United States, Belize and others speak English, why don’t the Chinese speak “Chinese?” It’s right to make a distinction between the standard Chinese (putonghua) and the Guangdong dialect (guangdonghua). But the “species” is one thing, the “variety” or “branch” or “family” (as in botanical) is another one. We distinguish the English of England, Ireland and Scotland, as well as the English of New York, Texas and California, but is it not unreasonable to accept that China borrows from foreigners the name “mandarin” for its national language?

In recent years, in some translated text from Chinese, we can read that the Chinese speak han. The word hanyu may designate the language in Chinese, but not in English, Italian or French, where han designates the ethnic group only. To say that on Chinese money bills, the inscriptions are in the five main languages (not dialects) of the country: Han, Tibetan, Mongol, Uygur and Zhuang, is replacing one mistake with another.
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The author is a Canadian working in Beijing