In today's digital age, the online public domain, particularly social networking websites, is the new frontier for the battle between censors and dissidents. This paper examines linguistic trends in the ways in which Chinese web users exploit Chinese phonology, morphology, and orthography to avoid notice by online censors through the lenses of pragmatics and critical discourse analysis. The linguistic transformations can be divided into 1) phonologically derived transformations, e.g. the well known "river crab" (héxiè, 河蟹) in place of the word "harmony" (héxié, 和谐); 2a) character suggestion (phono-orthographical) e.g. referring to former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (Wēn Jiābǎo, 温家宝) as "Teletubby" (tiānxiàn bǎobǎo, 天线宝宝) because of the two names' shared character 宝 (bǎo); and 2b) character suggestion (morpho-orthographical) e.g. the made-up word 目田 (mù tián, "eye field") being substituted for 自由 (zìyóu, "freedom"). Consequently, introducing multiple linguistic transformations, in particular introducing elements of foreign languages and ideograms, drastically increases the level of encoding. This paper presents examples of combination methods, including Chinese-English compound words that connote disparate yet interdependent meanings in multiple languages meanings, as well as the youth culture phenomenon of Martian language, or 吙☆魰 (火星文, huǒxīng wén). In characterizing the ways in which web users manipulate Chinese language, this paper aims to demonstrate that these transformation techniques are inherent to the Chinese language as well as a byproduct of the relationship between web users and censors, reflected in the encoded subversive messages heavy reliance on political and cultural references. Thus, interpreting the output strings of subversive messages requires both linguistic knowledge and social context.
L’opération de traduction est toujours délicate car il convient de retranscrire fidèlement le texte de départ dans une langue-cible. Cet article se focalise sur l’analyse de la traduction d’un type particulier de phrases, à savoir les proverbes français et espagnols. Quelles sont les contraintes spécifiques à cet ensemble linguistique ? Peut-on traduire un proverbe en conservant ses singularités, tant formelles que sémantiques ?
In China’s Xinjiang Province, narratives of counterterrorism and economic development have accompanied heightened regional and national securitization, including the detainment in “re-education camps” of over one million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities. Government language policies, technological surveillance, mass detentions, and homestay programmes intended to discipline Uyghurs into ideal political subjects enforce and transgress boundaries between the public and domestic spheres. These strategies of banal masked coercion reinforce norms of kinship and privacy while simultaneously enacting violent transgressive control over the subjects those norms produce. In this paper, I introduce the concept of “surveillance of intimate technologies” to convey how such surveillance strategies afford the creation and maintenance of the kinship relations they simultaneously betray. Intimate technologies such as smartphones become sites of sustaining both social ties and surveillance. Surveillance of intimate technologies also takes the form of government homestay campaigns to enlist over one million representatives of the Chinese state to enter Uyghur homes, act as “relatives”, and monitor Uyghurs for demonstrations of apparent extremism and subversion. I assert that surveillance of intimate technologies perpetuates fantasies of a private, removed, family space while also destabilizing its logics. These apparent perversions of kinship and family structures at once affirm their “valid” and normative modalities and also maintain the state’s appearance as a cohesive actor through demonstration of its reach into a constructed domestic domain.
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