Friday, 16 May 2008

On the way to work....

Getting a bit sick of spotting mistakes in the Chinese section of the free newspaper, MyPaper aka 我报. Given my standard of Chinese/Mandarin, it has to be a rather in-your-face, blatant error for me to actually spot it....

Today's glaring errata is in the article on the winner of the recent "Executive Look" with Raffles City being stated as "来福士城" which is in fact WRONG. The Chinese/Mandarin version of "Raffles" is supposed to be "莱佛士城". Geh. Guess not everybody would know that but it IS the name of our country's founder so it's a bit shocking to see it as an errata.....

EDIT: After Boon pointed a good point about CapitaLand possibly intentionally changing the Chinese name for fengshui or whatever other nonsense (please refer to the comments if you don't know what I am talking about), I did some more google-ing on the China Google site, and realised that reporter is correct after all. Apologies to MyPaper and the reporter in question. As ridiculous as the "new, modern" version seems to me, it's official. TT_TT 来福士城=莱佛士城 Apparently it's to standardise the name between the Shanghai Raffles City and the Singapore Raffles City, as well as to add a modern twist (and confusion in our already deplorable state of Mandarin here in Singapore) to it. And I'm not the only one that finds this name change a bad taste in my mouth... Lanyu already blogged about this last year (I feel so outdated), and here's the Google translated entry for all you kantangs out there... Though the Google translation puts "来福士城" as "Volkswagon" for some weird reason so the Google english version is a little garbled... LOL... Thoughts from the rest of you? I still prefer the original name as much as the new name is rather tongue-in-the-cheek but how many of the younger generation actually realise this?

OT: Mr Chrysopelea has been deposited at RMBR, in the process of thawing. Will try to be present when they start doing the pickling....

3 comments:

boonleong said...

But Raffles City, being a commercial entity, might adopt it's own Chinese name, especially one that brings in more prosperity.

juanicths said...

Hmmm.... It seems that you may be right since the Shanghai Raffles City uses "来福士" (http://www.rafflescity-shanghai.com) though the wikipedia entry on Raffles City (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raffles_City) uses "莱佛士" so I really don't know if CapitaLand "renamed" Raffles intentionally, or if the difference in name is to differential between the Singapore one and the Shanghai one (and confusing the reporter). A quick Google shows that "Raffles City" is spelled out in English even on Chinese sites, and for those that include the Chinese name, it's written as "莱佛士", so I really don't know....

TS said...

Alamak~ so much prefer the older name which we learn from our textbooks from young. Felt this is like a slash to our cultural identity by putting such a deliberate and "fake" name...