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Advertising and Marketing
Characters in the public interestPosted by Joel Martinsen, December 13, 2006 8:00 AM
Exhortations to "write standard characters" appear on banners and billboards throughout Beijing. This clever full-page spread in The Beijing News on Tuesday announces itself as a "public service advertisement," (公益广告), only the composer has mistakenly replaced "public welfare" (公益) with the homophone "justice" (公义), [and his editor has called him on it]. The copy (click the image for the full thing) reads:
An image of the list of one-hundred misused characters is here; errors are in red and corrections are in parentheses. The characters are judged according to the 5th edition of the Dictionary of Modern Chinese, published by The Commercial Press, so there may be more wrong with the "public service advertisement" line than just a mistaken character. Links and Sources
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Comments on Characters in the public interest
Did you add the correct character (益), or was it already there in the original ad?
I mean, was it an intentional mistake to point out how silly it can look, or did they actual print the add with the wrong character accidentally?
Hmm...you're right, that's not very clear. The image is all original. I'll make a clarification.