| I think it is rather necessary for translations of Chinese characters into its English equivalent. I believe it is part of being friendly, especially in an increasingly cosmpolitan city like Shanghai. Decoding Chinese characters can be quite a daunting task for people who do not have knowledge of written Chinese.
Having lived in France, I understand how speedyop feels. The French seems unwilling to adopt any other language but French. But I think in France, its a matter of principles. The French made some effort even to establish l'Academie Francais, to establish a single France as one country. Accomodating for other languages is a sign of disunity from the conceptual point of view. The idealistic aim is to unite France and not to be anti-foreign. I felt that somehow, it became a notorious and rather misunderstood characteristic of the Frenchman. And probably somewhat misinterpreted by their own citizens as well. A point on language translation is that I see two kinds of possible translations. A direct translations to its English phonetic equivalent, the Hanyu Pinyin, or a semantic translation. Each character in Chinese carries a lot of implicit meaning and the translation in meaning to its English equivalent is not a one Chinese character to one English word mapping relationship. Ultimately, I guess it is up to the kind of message that the person who designed the message board wants to convey. |
So Many Typos in Shanghai Metro