Xi Jinping meets President Omaba in Paris
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The headline blares:
Xí Jìnpíng huìjiàn Měiguó zǒngtǒng Àomǎbā 习近平会见美国总统奥马巴 ("Xi Jinping meets American President Omaba")
One might chalk this up to a colossal typo if it happened once, but it recently occurred numerous times on a variety of Chinese platforms and in many print and online publications. Some photographs and screenshots are collected here, here, and here.
Even if some ignorant, incompetent typist were responsible for this error in the first instance, it boggles the mind to think that countless editors and proofreaders would not catch it upon one of its many subsequent iterations, both in headlines and in the body of articles.
Laura Morland said,
December 4, 2015 @ 1:09 am
Maybe it's simply become his new Chinese name!
On a more serious note, is Àomǎbā possibly easier for a Chinese speaker to pronounce than, say, Àobǎmā?
Ken Miner said,
December 4, 2015 @ 1:33 am
Editors and proofreaders don't do didley-squat here; perhaps it's the same in China.
Michael Watts said,
December 4, 2015 @ 2:59 am
"Colossal typo"? It seems kind of tame as these things go. Wikipedia has some great transposition errors from bibles:
I'd feel remiss if I didn't mention again that I knew a group of Chinese kids who were very amused by Obama's name, writing it 哦吧吗. (Three particles, o-ba-ma, that can end sentences, basically indicating unspecified emotion, suggestion, and interrogative mood respectively. The whole joke seemed to be that Obama's name was just a bunch of sentence particles. I guess I might be amused by someone whose last name was To-the-of.)
Victor Mair said,
December 4, 2015 @ 10:25 am
"Tame"? The surname of POTUS, who has just met with the president of China in a major European capital, is emblazoned in headlines across a nation of 1.357 billion people. That's not a "colossal" typo?
Those Chinese youths may have written "Obama 哦吧吗" in jest, but linguistically what they did makes a lot of sense. A case could be made that all foreign proper names should be transcribed with characters having mouth radicals that are devoid of semantic content.
The "standard" rendering of the surname Khrushchev / Хрущёв in Chinese is Hèlǔxiǎofū 赫鲁晓夫 ("conspicuous / glowing / angry / grand / awe-inspiriting — rash / stupid / rude / crass / rough — dawn / know / be familiar with — husband / fellow"), but I once (in the early 70s) saw it transcribed at Hēilǔxuěfū 黑鲁雪夫, which a Chinese friend explained to me as meaning "black-stupid-snowman").
If transcriptions of foreign proper names were restricted to asemantic particles, two positive results would obtain:
1. it would be fairly obvious that the string of syllables so marked is a name and is not intended to be interpreted as consisting of meaningful morphemes
2. embarrassing gaffes and various types of dissonance would be avoided
AG said,
December 4, 2015 @ 10:40 am
Is… um… "horse color" a common term or type of term? Does this error show people reinterpreting the name to fit it into common noun+adjective syntax?
[disclaimer: I have no idea how common anything is in Chinese, as I don't know squat about the language.]
liuyao said,
December 4, 2015 @ 10:53 am
I had to read five times to catch the typo, even though this has been flying around in social media.
What it really illustrates is the open secret that such news reports are being handed down from Xinhua news agency, and the editors aren't supposed to change a word of it. No one proofreads it, and I'm not surprised if there are other typos (names of lesser importance) that no one ever found out about.
Toma said,
December 4, 2015 @ 1:23 pm
@ Ken Miner
Would you care to step outside?
Ken Miner said,
December 4, 2015 @ 2:56 pm
@ Toma Ok, some editors and proofreaders don't do didley-squat; my journal is full of examples. I'll just give you one especially egregious one. David Baldacci, The Forgotten, PB edition p. 54: "… there was one picture of the two of them in which Lloyd was wearing his army greens from World War II." The army greens were a 1956 innovation; I wore them myself. Baldacci should have checked with his dad. But where was his editor? I'm noticing stuff like this at a rate of at least one a month.
I will admit to some confusion, however. Last year one Hamilton Nolan had an article in Gawker (8-18) "Against Editors" which claims that editors monkey around too much with their texts. "Editors … tend to edit. Whether it is necessary or not." Nolan says that if you take a finished article from the New Yorker (the most edited journal there is) and run it through seven more editors, they'll all make changes. The only thing I can conclude is that journalism is a lot different from other writing.
If you're an editor or proofreader, please enlighten me on what is going on.
julie lee said,
December 4, 2015 @ 2:56 pm
What the misspellling says to me is that most editors and proof-readers in China don't read English-language or Western-language news.
Bob Ladd said,
December 4, 2015 @ 3:19 pm
Michael Watts: Somewhere in my attic I have a copy of the US Constitution as reproduced in Army Regulation no. something-or-other, which I kept as a souvenir of my experience when I was drafted many years ago. In the part describing the impeachment procedure, the Constitution specifies that "When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside [over the Senate sitting in judgement]", but in the Army version it said "When the President of the United States is tired, the Chief Justice shall preside". So thoughtful, those Founding Fathers….
Michael Watts said,
December 4, 2015 @ 3:28 pm
Actually, I tend to agree, and from what I can tell a lot of characters with 口 radicals were created specifically to transcribe foreign words. But people today don't seem to be comfortable with creating new characters ad hoc; when I've expressed the idea to Chinese people that foreign words or names should probably use 口字旁-marked characters, their reaction tends to be "no no no, those characters already mean something else" (although I don't see how that would be worse than what they're doing now — 马 already means horse).
The ancient Chinese might have made this easier on the modern Chinese if they'd used one radical to symbolize "this character is pure sound" and a different one to symbolize "this word is related to mouths" (for example, 吃 [eat]，喝 [drink]，嘴 [mouth]，and 吻 [kiss] all have the 口字旁, but they all have it for semantic reasons rather than to indicate "foreign word with no semantics").
Michael Watts said,
December 5, 2015 @ 4:02 am
AG: I can't really speak to whether "horse color" is a recognized term (although I don't see how color came up at all…?), but I can say that in Chinese adjectives generally cannot follow nouns.
It's interesting to observe that the characters 巴马, while not overtly marked for lack of semantics, are all common in meaningless foreign-word uses. For example:
巴西 ba-xi, Brazil
巴黎 ba-li, Paris
马来西亚 ma-lai-xi-ya, Malaysia
罗马 luo-ma, Rome.
I was going to say the same thing about 奥, but on further inspection it turned out that 澳大利亚 ao-da-li-ya (Australia) is written with a slightly different ào.
Nathan said,
December 5, 2015 @ 6:11 am
@ Michael Watts
I'd find a president's name pretty funny, actually, if it was made up of flavour particles like "Hmm-What-Huh?" :)
languagehat said,
December 5, 2015 @ 9:39 am
@ Toma Ok, some editors and proofreaders don't do didley-squat; my journal is full of examples. I'll just give you one especially egregious one. David Baldacci, The Forgotten, PB edition p. 54: "… there was one picture of the two of them in which Lloyd was wearing his army greens from World War II." The army greens were a 1956 innovation; I wore them myself. Baldacci should have checked with his dad. But where was his editor? I'm noticing stuff like this at a rate of at least one a month.
I complain a lot about gaffes by my fellow editors, but I wouldn't expect them to catch something like that, and I wouldn't have caught it myself — it's the province of fact-checkers, not editors, and they're a dying breed. The New Yorker is the only publication where that kind of fact-checking used to be taken for granted, and even there it's hit-and-miss these days. I'm astonished that you think a recondite fact about military uniform history is comparable to blatantly misspelling the name of a world leader.
Ken Miner said,
December 5, 2015 @ 5:16 pm
I'm astonished that you think a recondite fact about military uniform history is comparable to blatantly misspelling the name of a world leader.
I have, as I said, other examples. Guess I picked the wrong one.
languagehat said,
December 5, 2015 @ 6:01 pm
But are they examples of bad fact-checking? Because it's unreasonable to expect editors (much less proofreaders!) to do that. I myself, being excessively conscientious, frequently look up quotes and correct mistaken facts I happen to know about, but I would never dream of checking on the history of military uniform color (which is the only example you have given). If some of your examples involve bad grammar or spelling, sure, those editors should be ashamed of themselves. (And I have my own such collection.)
Chris said,
December 6, 2015 @ 6:59 am
I like it better than what we hear on the BBC, which is Obamer.
Stephen said,
December 6, 2015 @ 7:46 am
@Victor Mair
I'm in total agreement with Michael Watt's first post (December 4, 2015 @ 2:59 am).
As a typo this is pretty silly but hardly colossal and trivial in comparison to the examples that Michael gave.
These are the foreign language name of a "here-today … gone-tomorrow politician" in "tomorrow's chip-paper", as opposed to something in the translator's (editor's, compositor's) own language that they believed to be the inspired word of God that has been passed on for millennia and will be used until the end of days.
languagehat said,
December 6, 2015 @ 10:34 am
Do you really not understand the difference between a one-off typo (of which there are an infinite number of examples, though of course when it happens in the Bible it's striking and long-remembered) and a consistently wrong spelling of the name of the most powerful individual in the world? (And a "here-today … gone-tomorrow politician"? Seriously? I won't speculate as to your reasons for taking that attitude toward Obama, but I hope you'd be consistent and say the same thing about Reagan, another two-term president.)
Stephen said,
December 6, 2015 @ 12:22 pm
@languagehat
I completely understand the difference between a single typo and the same mis-spelling appearing multiple times (but as some have pointed out quite possibly largely from the same source).
I also understand, as you clearly don't, that this was not the point that Michael Watts was referring to and that I was agreeing with.
"(And a "here-today … gone-tomorrow politician"? Seriously?"
Something else you clearly don't understand are quotation marks. Before commenting on this further you really should look this up.
Ken Miner said,
December 7, 2015 @ 3:17 am
But are they examples of bad fact-checking?
No, most of my collectibles are on the level of “ad nauseum” for “ad nauseam”, etc; but dangling participles are ever popular ("Standing now at the lectern, the jury was in the box to my right…" in Michael Connelly, The Lincoln Lawyer, p 254, Grand Central Publishing edition. Or in Robert Dugoni's The Conviction: “Sitting up, the jail cell spun and twisted…”)
But it seems to me the boundary between fact-checking and editing/proofreading is a little hazy. In a recent James Patterson hit called Don't Blink, on page 38 it is revealed that the sound recorder Nick Daniels has is a digital voice recorder, which he is old enough to call a "tape recorder" merely out of habit. But 28 pages later, on page 66, we find: "I was about to hit the rewind button when…" (And this novel has two authors, neither of whom noticed the slip, nor – it goes without saying – did the editor). So is that fact-checking or editing?
languagehat said,
December 7, 2015 @ 9:26 am
No, most of my collectibles are on the level of “ad nauseum” for “ad nauseam”, etc; but dangling participles are ever popular
Oh yeah, I've got my own file of those — believe me, I'm well aware of the failings of some of my colleagues.
So is that fact-checking or editing?
Good question. It's the kind of thing I hope I'd catch if I were working on the book, but it wouldn't be my job to do so. Unfortunately, in today's profit-obsessed world, publishers leave all that sort of thing to authors and take no responsibility whatever; lest you think I'm making it up or exaggerating, here it is from the horse's mouth, the managing editor at Columbia University Press: "Ultimately, what appears in the book is the responsibility of the author, not the editor. .. Books always contain a few errors." (Here's my response: " I think putting it all onto the author is a shocking abdication of responsibility.")
AG said,
December 7, 2015 @ 9:17 pm
Sorry everyone, I wrote something about "horse color" above because I got 巴 and 色 mixed up (told you I don't know anything about the language) – I was just trying to ask if anyone had any ideas about the relative frequency of MA-BA versus BA-MA, whether purely from a sound perspective or taking into account the "meaning" of the characters.