Words to impress your cabbie

Michaela Kabat | Nov 17, 2007 9:30 am | Add a comment | 1382 reads

We've got it all here: sex, crime, censorship and the Olympics.

Chuāngxì (sex scene): Xinhua reports on the dangers of young Chinese lovers rushing to practice the moves they learned from watching chuāngxì in (the uncut version of) Lust, Caution. Read the entire entertaining translation at Shanghaiist (including such gems as “these highly challenging positions should be considered as ‘snacks,' and not your ‘main course.'”)

不少影迷有意模仿《色·戒》高难度床戏
Many fans are eager to imitate Lust, Caution’s highly complicated sex scenes.

Pèngcí túanhǔo (car crash gang): This autumn 31 people were charged in Beijing courts for 220 cases of pèngcí, i.e. causing minor car accidents, claiming the other driver was responsible and intimidating them into paying damages, sometimes as high as RMB 20,000. The original meaning of the expression pèngcí (literally, “bump porcelain”) referred to antique sellers placing their wares in the street where someone would knock it over; they would then force the person responsible to pay an exorbitant price for the destroyed item.

团伙成员专门挑选外地车辆碰瓷，在220余名被害人中，北京市仅有20人。
The gangs were specifically targeting the cars of out-of-towners to pèngcí; out of the 220 victims, there were only 20 Beijingers.

Wǎngjiān (Internet monitor): 网监 refers to the tens of thousands of Internet police who patrol the great Chinese web daily. China Digital Times (note: their website is only accessible through a proxy server; try Anonymouse) reports on a play-on-words for 网监 – the homonym 网奸. 奸, also pronounced jiān, means to rape or to do something equally violating; as a noun, jiān can be translated as "bastard," "pervert" or really any negative word implying sexual perversion or general awfulness. CDT translates a post by a SINA blogger whose posts have been removed due to inappropriate content:

Some bloggers on SINA.com have found themselves under much tighter censorship recently. When their posts are deleted, they also receive an additional text from the "System Administrator." Here is an example:

"Sorry. Your post “The Internet Monitors are becoming Internet Bastards (网监快成网奸)” has been deleted by the System Administrator. We apologize for any inconvenience. If you have questions, please email us and we will get back to you within 24 hours.

Number 33721 user, please pay attention. You have violated the Regulation on Internet Security and Management of the People's Republic of China. Your IP is under surveillance now. Please do not publish such posts which contains reactionary or anti-China content. Otherwise, we will work with China Internet Monitoring agencies to adopt unconventional measures."

Wǎnglùo tānhùan (Internet server crash; literally, Internet paralysis): As we reported two weeks ago, the Olympic ticketing website crashed within minutes of becoming available on Oct 30. Chinese newspapers chalked up the wǎnglùo tānhùan to the incredible enthusiasm for the games (the website recorded an average of 200,000 submissions per minute, according to BOCOG) – but we think that considering the ticket phase was supposed to be first-come first-serve, they ought to have prepared a bit better. They’ve now changed it to a lottery system that will take place in December.