Some people whose posts may otherwise have been deleted by censors in China have taken to writing backwards in an effort to defeat keyword-searching authorities.
"Bloggers on forums such as Tianya.cn have taken to posting in formats that China's Internet censors, often employees of commercial Internet service providers, have a hard time automatically detecting. One recent strategy involves online software that flips sentences to read right to left instead of left to right, and vertically instead of horizontally," write Juliet Ye and Geoffrey Fowler in The Wall Street Journal.
This is a particularly clever solution in Chinese, which, because of its ideographic writing system, is probably easier to read in odd inversions than most alphabetic languages. One way to imagine this is to remember the English phrase "bass ackwards," a well-understood inversion. Because Chinese splits words into meaning-based units rendered in characters, reading reverse text is more akin to "bass ackwards" than to "sdrawkcab ssa." At least, I think so. We'd have to ask serious linguists to confirm my hunch.
Another circumvention method that has been in action for many years is to write the text and take a screenshot of it. Censors aren't very good at parsing text in a JPEG file.
I don't know whether this is the first time this tactic has been used, but it's one indication of the determination of some people in China to exchange information despite state efforts to control online communications.
Google is slated to release a robust Chinese-English dictionary featuring 13 dictionaries in collaboration with Kingsoft, a producer of PC-based dictionaries, according to a Chinese blog that I will inadequately translate as "Dances With Google."
The new product will drop Thursday at 2:30 a.m. China time, according to the blog. It will include such things as menu items, which are often perilously mistranslated into English.
The inventor of the increasingly ubiquitous Pleco Chinese-English dictionary software for Palm and Windows Mobile devices said the company is "very seriously considering developing" an iPhone version.
In an interview in April's China International Business (not yet online), Michael Love tells of developing the 6-year-old product and how it's getting popular enough that many foreigners in China are buying PDAs or PDA phones just to use Pleco.
I, for one, would not have bought my Windows Mobile-running HTC Touch if not for this program, and untold dozens of my Beijing friends and acquaintances are carrying around Treos for the same reason. (Love said he switches between a Treo 680 and an HTC Touch, himself.)
Here's what Love had to say about the iPhone prospects:
We're not thrilled about Apple locking down distribution and charging developers a 30 percent commission to sell iPhone software, but we really like the platform and think it has enough potential to be worth the hefty fees.
The iPod Touch is actually more exciting to us, in some respects, than the iPhone, since it doesn't force you to change your cell phone carrier and can be found almost anywhere.
It's next to impossible to buy a cell phone-less Palm or Windows Mobile handheld in many parts of the world nowadays, but the iPod Touch is all over the place, so for those people who are willing to buy a handheld just to run Pleco, it would be a better option than they've had in quite a while.
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