Pinyin English

Mainland Chinese like to use the Romanized pronunciation symbols of Mandarin as "English" translation. You may think it makes sense for names of people and places etc, but in fact they do it even for things where ordinary English words exist. (The word "pinyin" itself is an example - it stands for Romanized pronunciation.) Moreover those words are then grouped together into garbage-like chunks; for example "Tebie Xingzhengqu" (to know what it means, read on.) Other examples include "Yazhou Zhoukan", the name of a magazine meaning "Asia weekly" (even their URL uses the acronym of the pinyin: http://www.yzzk.com).

Even western media are adopting such practices. For example, the URL of the BBC Chinese website is http://www.bbc.com/zhongwen where "zhongwen" is the pinyin of "Chinese (the language)".

Yet, as long as it is only done in China, it is none of our business. The problem is that this practice has now invaded into Hong Kong as well.

Xianggang
Mainland Chinese have long abolished traditional English spelling and goes for Putonghua "translations" for place names like Beijing (Peking), Guandong (Canton) etc. But even the name "Hong Kong" is under threat - being replaced by "Xianggang". Culprits include:

FIFA, who once on their website called Hong Kong "Xianggang Tebie Xingzhengqu" (where "Tebie" stands for "Special" and "Xingzhengqu" means "Administrative Region" - HKSAR in full);

The Encyclopaedia Britannica (see http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10795 );

The Vatican;

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, who once used "Xianggang" on its Masters application website;

"Xianggang Putonghua Yanxishe Primary School of Science and Creativity", a primary school in Hong Kong founded by an Putonghua-promoting organization. The "Yanxishe" actually means some kind of a study group.

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