Shanghai China Snippets Observations about living in Shanghai and China in general

February 27, 2008

Beijing Olympic Typos

Filed under: China Olympics — Shanghai @ 4:14 am

Typos happen and I’m sure I have contributed many to this world, most of them online I guess. In many cases it’s just that but in some cases, like important mails for example or titles of articles I try to make sure it doesn’t happen.

Heck, I even re-read important mails to minimize the chance that an annoying mistake finds its way into my writings. It’s matter of quality control and the more important, the more scrutiny is required.

Josh from aCupofCha noticed that the English version of the Chinese Olympic Games website lacks this kind of quality control.

The site has 3 versions of the page title.

You have the homepage,
Chinese Olympic website

that reads, “Official Website of the Chinese Olympic Committee“, which is correct.

You have however most of the sub pages,

Olympic Typos
that show, “Offcial Website of the Chinese Olympic Committee

And you even have pages that say,
Olympic spelling
Offcial Website of the Chinaese Olympic Committee”

I have been told numerous times by Chinese that English compared to Chinese is such an easy language. Maybe it is, but typing it correctly may help as well, especially if the whole world will be visiting this website this year.

2 Comments »

  1. “lacks this kind of quality control” Isn’t that expected ?

    Comment by Bill — February 27, 2008 @ 12:32 pm

  2. I believe not before the day China adds English to its list of national official language and makes it equally important to Chinese language, the mis-used of English of this nature and other grammatical problems will still be very common.

    I’m definitely not one of the most pickest person, but every single day living in China (after I moved here a couple of months ago) I have been picking up 5-20 spelling mistakes or grammatical errors in English writings from even the highly education environments.

    Comment by Gordon Choi — March 23, 2008 @ 7:21 am

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