Chinese media, advertising, and urban life.

No mention of bed-sheets

The attractive necklace at left is the title illustration from an article about fashion trends in this week's issue of BQ lifestyle magazine (北京青年周刊). Major designers are putting out new styles in white this year to convey a sense of simplicity, grace, and spring-time, so the color white has a certain power in this year's fashion marketplace.

The English title's just there for show, really, so there's not much point in getting upset about it.

A more serious translation scandal involved the poet Yi Sha, who was recently invited to a poetry festival in Rotterdam. The conference's promotional materials included the line "Sha Yi edited a literary magazine named Not-Not, which played a central role in the lively, alternative poetry circuit outside Peking," which seems to imply that Yi Sha was editor-in-chief of the magazine, when in fact he was merely on the editorial board.

Yi Sha

The misunderstanding (which only existed in the English copy; the Dutch text identified Yi Sha as one of a number of editors) inflamed the passions of online poetry fans who, as China's netizens are wont to do, accused the poet of padding his resume and misrepresenting his position in China's poetry scene.

After a bit of back-and-forth, including an investigation by The Beijing News and response from the organizers in Rotterdam that they invited "Yi Sha the poet, not Yi Sha the editor of Not-Not," things were cleared up. A report in the Huashang News identified the likely root of the problem: a series of misinformed translators: