Dreams of White Tiles . . .

Due to desperate avoiding of work (a particularly dull translation which requires me to acquire vocabulary like ‘slops’ and ‘cooling tower’), here are 3 photos from a recent trip to the Forbidden City here in Beijing.

Translation I did for PressInterpreter.org on control of Beijing’s migrant population from an original article on Caijing.

Press Interpreter looks like a very promising site, and it ties in with some stuff that I do anyway (ie, idly sitting around reading a Chinese newspaper) so I may well contribute some more stuff. My current question though, is who runs the site and why? There’s no ‘about’ information, and my last two emails to their contact address have bounced.

Will post the Chinese and English together below. There are a few places where I feel the English is a little clumsy or inaccurate, which I’ll highlight.
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Finished a site today which I’ve been thinking about for months and working on off-and-on for about two weeks, Signese.com. Basically, it’s simply a collection of photos featuring Chinese characters, which I take as I wander around Beijing.

Many, if not all, of the photos are not actually very aesthetically pleasing – I’m not a great photographer, I don’t have a great camera, and on occassion I have to stand between streams of traffic to take a photo. This does not make for great photography. However, it’s a very low maintanence site now it’s up and running – I’ve already got enough photos up there to see me through to May, with shots coming onto the site at a rate of one a day – and should be of interest to anyone who likes to see how 汉字 are used in real life.

Newsinchinese.com originally started up almost exactly a year ago. I’d surf through Chinese news sites, and if I saw an interesting story post an English summary and a link. It was a great idea, and like many of my great ideas it died when I just sort of lost interest.

NewsinChinese.com is now, however, relaunched. In cooperation with Adsotrans.com it now provides huge quantities of Chinese news, annotated with English and pinyin, and giant-sized characters so you don’t have to strain your eyes figuring out how to write it.

I think it’s a pretty impressive site – all the more so when you consider that if you discount the (not-inconsiderable) amount of time to get it set up, it was free to do – from the WordPress blog software and plugins, to the javascript from DynamicDrive.com.

One of the beauties of it though, is that now it’s up and running it’s entirely automatic – which means even if I lose interest in it, it’ll keep on updating every 10 minutes.

Also, stay tuned for a couple more sites of general China interest which should be ready in the next few weeks.