CHINESE NEWSPAPERS IN NYC.

Today’s NY Times has a long article by Joseph Berger about the competition among the Chinese-language newspapers of New York; it’s worth reading if you’re interested in the subject, but I cite it here for this paragraph about format:

With more readers comfortable in English, the newspapers have revised their format, printing Chinese text horizontally, from left to right, rather than vertically, from top to bottom. That allows them to insert English phrases like “early decision” or “the official preppy handbook” into articles. (Reporters use English keyboards, writing Chinese characters by typing in a phonetic version of a Chinese word; this brings up a menu of possible Chinese characters.)

Comments

  1. Chinese newspapers changed text formatting, I think not because fierce competition but people are used to internet where all Chinese text whether not gb23112 or big5, are horizontally arranged. It is also most readerships are immigrant from mainland china regardless of paper’s political leaning. If this trend is here to stay, I wonder other Chinese newspaper in SEA, say Thailand or Malaysia, will follow suit.

  2. I’m still waiting for the day when the English-language American papers do what the English-language Chinese/Asian papers often do: when they use the name of someone whose name is normally rendered in a non-Roman script, they also include it after, parenthesized, in its native script.

  3. Amen!

  4. “Reporters use English keyboards, writing Chinese characters by typing in a phonetic version of a Chinese word; this brings up a menu of possible Chinese characters.”
    OMG, the Duke Chinese Typist lives! I learned to use that puppy back when it lived on a single 5 1/4″ floppy. I really truly did.

  5. Most Korean papers (and almost all other printed matter) have changed to right to left, top to bottom. And not because of the reasons cited for Chinese papers in NYC… tests have just proven that it’s easier to read that way.

  6. Chinese newspapers in Chinese, though, don’t use native-script versions of non-Chinese names, or they didn’t last I looked. I remember once spending about an hour figuring out a list of names and titles (“Pierre LePin, Belgian Associate Minister of Transportation, …, …, …, …, …, ….”), then realizing that it was the translation of an AP story. I believe it was DeFrancis who claimed that the Chinese is the worst possible writing system into which to transliterate foreign words. “X” is a three-syllable word, for example.

Speak Your Mind

*