Monthly Archive for September, 2006

Sex Scandals & WoW (redux)

Published
by
Jason Li
on September 29, 2006
in Games
. 3 Comments

20060930_ww2

ESWN has a story about “the Second WoW War,” where the First WoW War would be based about The Most Famous Pervert In China. It is, in short, a tale about a virgin maiden and her seduction at the hands of a powerful WoW guildmaster. The tale is told by the maiden’s elder brother on Tianya Club forum.

Facts of the tragic story surrounding the implied call to war were examined, and doubts were cast on certain details. Netizens remained guarded and wary. Then it was revealed that the male WoW seducer in question belonged to a guild that had just climbed its way to #1, and that the post (containing the sordid seduction story) was suspiciously posted right after this annoucement.

Could jealous WoW players be overturning the Chinese flash mob phenomenon for unjust and untrue ends?

Link: ESWN post

the inventiveness of Chinese farmers Part Two

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on September 28, 2006
in Blogs
. 13 Comments

One of our first posts on Virtual China, and still one of the most popular, was on the homemade inventions of various farmers across China: boats, cars, subs, and so on.  There are also homemade airplanes out there.  Now it’s an amphibious vehicle, being reported via "China’s BoingBoing," Postshow.

Boat

On Sept. 25, 75-year old boatsman Hu Zeshen piloted the dual-use amphibious vehicle that he invented.

Car

Mr. Hu lives in Loudi city, Hunan Province, in southern China, and has spent his life working on ships plying China’s rivers and canals. He calls his invention "the Happy Boat." The vehicle has a 5 horsepower diesel engine and a 1 horsepower electric engine.  He and his wife plan to take the vehicle on holiday during China’s National Day vacation, to explore scenic waterways in other parts of his province.  Mr. Hu will apply for a patent for his vehicle, too.

Instant translation

Published
by
Kathrine Hoersted
on September 28, 2006
in Translation
. 2 Comments

Screenshot_060927190352

Talking about bridging language barriers, there is a really quick solution that I like to use for translating e.g. Chinese websites into English (of course I am still studying hard to learn the Chinese characters… but until then, I can cheat a little using this software :-)

This solution is the translation application called Foxlingo; it is a Firefox extension (so you need to have the Firefox browser to be able to use Foxlingo), and to install it simply go to addons.mozilla.org scroll down and click the Install Now link:
Screenshot_060927174922

After installing you will be asked to restart your Firefox browser. Once it has restarted, a window with three tabs will appear (if it doesn’t appear automatically, go to your Firefox toolbar, enter "tools" -> "extensions", highlight Foxlingo, and click "preferences/options" - then the window with the three tabs will open). In the first tab you check which languages you would like to be able to translate to, in the second you check which languages you would like to be able to translate from, and in the third you check the translation services you want available (I recommend you check them all). Then you click OK and you will be given the option of contributing with a donation.

You now have the Foxlingo toolbar in your browser. Right click in the grey area to the right of the row of flags, and you will be able to customize - move around the different flag-buttons that represent the languages. For instance I have the Chinese flag-button next to the search field in my upper toolbar, and when I am on a Chinese website I can simply click on the flag and choose to have the site translated (e.g., Chinese simplified to English (worldlingo). Within a few seconds the site appears in an English version, which is not at all a perfect translation, but most often it will give me a decent idea about the content of the website (and one thing is for sure, it serves me much better than my current Chinese character skill level  ;-)

Sometimes a site will appear in no language at all, but pure gibberish, then I click back to the original Chinese site and try another of the translation services. So far, I haven’t figured out what translation services work best for what kinds of Chinese websites (any ideas?), but usually one or the other will work fine.

Have fun in the Chinese cyberspace!

Google Books + Chinese materials

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on September 27, 2006
in Education, History and Search
. 0 Comments

K.M. Lawson at the multi-author China history blog Frog in a Well, provides a detailed tutorial on how to use Google Books to find open source historical material about China, and how to download texts in pdf format. Google Books allows you to do full-text searches of the books that are indexed already by Google, and apparently, to download some of those texts as well. 

Some examples of books that can be downloaded completely, just by searching for those with China in the title:
Odes to Kien Long: The Present Emperor of China; with The Quakers, a Tale; To a Fly, Drowned in a…
By Peter Pindar 1792

A Wayfarer in China: Impressions of a Trip Across West China and Mongolia
By Elizabeth Kimball Kendall 1913

The People of China: Their Country, History, Life, Ideas, and Relations with the Foreigner
By J. W. (John William) Robertson Scott 1900

Opium-smoking in America and China
By H. H. (Harry Hubbell) Kane 1882

Chinese to Pinyin transliteration

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on September 25, 2006
in Translation
. 1 Comment

I sometimes come across a Chinese character, often part of someone’s name or a place name, that I don’t know how to pronounce.  Here’s a handy character-to-Pinyin translation application, which is generously offered for free on a website called Ping Asian Imports.  They say that they get over 500 visitors a day using the service. 

Overcoming Language Barriers

Published
by
Kathrine Hoersted
on September 24, 2006
in Translation
. 1 Comment

As many of us experience on a daily basis, the language barrier is an important part of the reason why the Internet appears divided up into different Internets - e.g. an English and a Chinese Internet.

A number of good translation software applications exist today. In the future translation software will definitely develop into levels that provide more accurate translations, easier to use applications, and to a large extend automatic functionality, but to what extent?

Well, in any case, one way to deal with the barrier between English and Chinese languages is to learn the other language :-)

Linese.com is a website that presents itself
as “a platform for people around the world to learn Chinese and experience
Chinese culture. It is also a place for Chinese to study English and further
explore other cultures”.
Screenshot_060919232048

It offers both written and oral Chinese
lessons, and a large, interesting selection of cultural insights on a variety of topics - and new articles are added daily. For example you
can see pictures of and read about snacks that are either traditional or hip to consume in Beijing.

Screenshot_060922152654

You can also learn about World Heritage Preservation sites around China, read a discussion about gender equality in the Expat’s View section, or learn about the historical meaning of ghosts in Chinese culture.
Screenshot_060922152956

Stay tuned for future posts on online
language learning and translation software.

on the BBS today: luxurious government buildings

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on September 24, 2006
in BBS
. 3 Comments

Taian_govt_bldg

"Have you ever seen such a fancy government building?  Seeing the broad, stylish square in front of the Tai’An Municipal Government [in Shandong province], who would still dare to say that we Chinese are poor?!"

An example of what’s driving the Chinese economy: massive real estate projects intended to project power, respect, and wealth.  Apparently also a topic of some interest to Chinese BBS readers, nearly 200,000 of whom have read this thread posted on the Netease BBS on September 18.  The poster’s screenname is "News Commentator," and his icon is a photo of Bill Clinton.  What I love about the big BBS is that they seem to bring together a diverse set of views.  Some of what’s below is hard to understand, frankly–especially the photo of what looks like self-immolation.

Selected comments from the first page alone:

Beautiful!  This shows that Tai’An city has stepped into the ranks of the world’s most advanced cities.

Who took this?!  They didn’t even get the whole thing! It’s much bigger than this!…

I heard it cost more than 600 million RMB, not counting the square in front and the cost of several new roads that had to be built…if you go to the city to have a look it’s no different than any county-level city, but then this building is really up to standard…it’d even be worth a look in Shanghai.

Comrades!  No need to get envious!  With the right conditions, building another Tian’anmen Square would be no big deal.  That’s progress.

When acclaiming the greatness of the Great Wall, let’s not forget that it was built by the bodies of laborers.

The leaders have no shame.

A gift for the mayor of Tai’An, his entire family, and his elder and younger maternal aunts:
Guy_on_fire

This is only one corner of the square.  Actually the square is even bigger than Tian’anmen!

All those kids who can’t afford to go to school, and all that money we’re asked to donate to the Hope Foundation, while our officials spend money hand over fist.  Very upsetting.

Don’t forget the national humiliation!

I’m very moved, as a Chinese, and proud to have such a wealthy and wise government.

The property management fee alone is more than 20 million RMB.

Shandong province? It’s the richest province in Chinese eyes, people there do have money.

 

Backdorm boys cross the ocean

Published
by
Jason Li
on September 24, 2006
in Meme
. 1 Comment

Because I find myself in the business of tracking memes, I found this picture on the last page of a newly released American graphic novel called “American Born Chinese,” by Gene Luen Yang.

20060924_boysmeme

The rest of the page is blank, but the Backdorm Boys reference is clear.

alternative “rules of privacy” in Virtual China

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on September 20, 2006
in Art, BBS, Photos and Virtual China
. 1 Comment

ESWN translated a story that illustrates, for me, the speed at which digital content can go from private to full-on mainstream public in China.  It’s a significantly different understanding of the unspoken rules of Internet privacy, than in say, the U.S..  (Not that these rules aren’t constantly being rewritten: think of the recent Jason Fortuny "sexbaiting" story, in which he posted detailed responses from folks answering a sex want ad on Craigslist). But there are so many people doing stupid, rude things online in the U.S. that it takes a lot to get anyone to pay attention.  In China, however, representations of certain kinds of acts (and I’d like to think more about what kinds of acts these are) are unbelievably inflammatory. It must be terrifying to be caught up in.

Here’s the story this time: Some friends went to the Madame Toussaint Wax Museum in Shanghai and did some really stupid things with the wax statues, snapping pictures of themselves along the way (they said they just got carried away spoofing 恶搞). 

Waxfigures

(By the way, don’t you wonder how they got away with this?  There must have been hundreds of other people around!). Then they uploaded the photos to a computer so they could forward them to friends.  Someone posted them on a major BBS, and lots of people were upset, which led to criticisms, responses, apologies, and eventually mainstream news stories in (at least) the People’s Daily.

According to Roland Soong’s translation of a Shanghai Media Group interview with one of the friends:

I mean to say that I did not want to publicize this little thing.  I just want to share them within a small circle of friends.  But as soon as it got forwarded to a mainstream website, the effect becomes different.

The story also highlights the power of the major portals and their BBS’s. 

Gold Farmers documentary film

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on September 20, 2006
in Film and Games
. 1 Comment

Goldfarmers

Ge Jin, a Ph.D candidate in communications at UC San Diego, whose video clips on Chinese gold farmers and farm owners you might have seen on Youtube, has a full length documentary on the topic, called Gold Farmers.  Check out the film’s website.  It sounds amazing.  Gold farmers, for those readers who don’t follow online gaming super closely, are players who work inside certain kinds of online games to earn virtual money for themselves or their bosses, which is then converted into real money.  It’s controversial for many reasons (see this conversation on Terra Nova, for starters, in which Ge Jin writes: Chinese gold farmers don’t just play for money, many of them said this
job gives them pleasure and a sense of achievement too. In their work,
productivity interwines with pleasure, and that pleasure partly comes
from accumulating virtual wealth that dramatically contrasts their
poverty in real lives. Maybe they can be do more "useful" jobs, but
will those jobs be as "fulfilling" as gold farming?), and gold farmers are not always well-treated by fellow gamers in-game.

Among other encounters, the film tells the following story:

A Chinese gold farmer and an America gamer might kill a monster together. But language and social barriers prevent them from communicating with each other. They are a mystery to each other. What will happen when they actually meet in real life? Julian Dibbell, author of Play Money,has been trying to uncover the operation of gold farms in the past 3 years. He even tried to establish a gold farm himself just to understand how it works. From March 2003 to March 2004, he earned more from being a gold broker than he have ever earned as a professional writer. Julian will finally arrange a visit to the gold farm of Xiaobai. All the pieces of gold farming this global phenomenon will come together as Julian and the Chinese gold farmers discuss over what the game world means to them, how gold farming impacts their real and virtual lives, why China became the world factory of virtual goods, whether it signifies the beginning of a new new economy and our collective evolution into science fiction, or the inevitable reproduction of global capitalism in the virtual world…