Those of you in the NYC area might want to check out a new play by David Henry Hwang called ‘Chinglish’. Hwang, an American playwright from Los Angeles, should be familiar to you through his 1988 play ‘M. Butterfly’, later made into a film also written by Hwang.

Here’s the first paragraph of a New York Times article on ‘Chinglish’.

Even though much of the dialogue is in Mandarin, non-Chinese speakers should have no difficulty interpreting “Chinglish,” the sporadically funny new play by David Henry Hwang, which opened on Thursday night at the Longacre Theater. That’s not just because of the helpful supertitles — largely translations of mistranslations, in which English is merrily mutilated, and the principal source of this production’s mirth. Mr. Hwang’s comedy, about a bewildered American businessman hoping to make his fortune in capitalist China, is laid out with the frame-by-frame exactness of a comic strip.

Not being in New York, I won’t be going. But I’d be interested to hear from anyone who does see / has seen it. I myself would love to, being otherwise a fan of his.

It’s showing at the Longacre Theater, 220 West 48th Street, Manhattan. Call (212) 239-6200 for tickets.

Through a family connection* I’m looking for an experienced tutor to teach English to a prominent physician in Guangdong. Probably 1-2 hours per week in the Sun Yat-sen University (中山大学) area. If you’re interested, please contact me directly (hence closed comments): syz <at> sinoglot <dot> com.

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*Which is to say, no, we’re not turning Sinoglot into a web-based billboard, at least not until the price is right. Continue reading →

I was talking to Randy recently not specifically about text encoding and font rendering but in a sort of roundabout way that’s what we got to. Long story short, Android doesn’t support @font-face in CSS3 and the support for Sinitic characters is a bit weak. A text to my friend boxed out the character 妳 for example. Or was it 你?

In Shanghai, it seems everyone has an iPhone. I have an iPhone, as well as a handful of other Apple products. I used to run BeOS/Haiku but that can only last so long before I need some function/feature it lacks. And when I finally caved and joined the 21st century by buying a smartphone, I knew without a doubt it would be an iPhone. Not because I’m a fanboy, because I’m most certainly now. They’ve had many failures. But while you can complain all you want about walled gardens, when it comes to fonts and text rendering and obscure scripts, Apple just wins. Tіbеtаn keyboard layouts are built in to the system by default forchristsakes.

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I’ve recently been reminded of a couple misconceptions about sign language. Many people believe that there is a singular sign language, and that all who sign to communicate are able to understand each other. It’s similar to the idea that all Sinitic languages are written the same (they’re not) and that if only they would write the characters anyone can understand anyone else with 100% efficiency (they can’t). For sign language, it’s actually much worse.

Another common misconception is that sign language is just a 1:1 replacement of spoken words with hand gestures. This is also not true. In fact the grammar of American Sign Language (ASL) differs significantly from that of spoken American English. Oddly, some people have expressed both of these misconceptions, despite being inherently contradictory.

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