A traditional Chinese character version of China’s “Red Reading Program” series of children’s books has gone on sale in Taiwan, according to media reports. This problem has been a long time coming.
Due to the size of China’s market, the economies of scale and the shared language, many Taiwanese parents, with an eye on the price, choose toys and reading books — including picture books and audiobooks — produced in China using traditional characters. This means that, over the long term, Taiwanese children are being imperceptibly influenced by Chinese ideas and language usage.
Before cross-strait exchanges were deregulated, the government attached great importance to Japanese vocabulary and calligraphy styles, which influenced language teaching. The then-Mandarin Promotion Council took the initiative to promulgate standardized Songti (宋體), Kaiti (楷體) and Fangti (方體) computer fonts, which were made available for download free of charge.
These became the Chinese system fonts used on Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system, with the names changed to Ximing (細明), Biaokai (標楷) and Biaohei (標黑). The council’s work has had a long-lasting effect on the standardization of Chinese character typefaces and document management.
Yet just as the world entered the age of portable smart devices, the council was disbanded and its functions were taken over by the Ministry of Education’s National Languages Committee.
The committee failed to put enough effort into creating new system fonts for the mobile age. This resulted in the main mobile operating systems, including Apple Inc’s iOS and the Android operating system, adopting fonts with phonetic values and character forms from China.
This has meant that the standard character forms and pronunciations taught at schools only have limited use outside the classroom, since as soon as a child interacts with a mobile device they are greeted with Chinese character forms and pronunciations. In other words, the language of the younger generation is already being imperceptibly assimilated by China.
Many elderly Taiwanese use messaging apps to send pictures and videos, much of which originate from China, which use words and pronunciations that differ from those used in Taiwan.
Moreover, it is not the case that cartoons, children’s books or toys can be simply converted from simplified to traditional characters. In addition to individual words that need to be changed, the underlying ideology behind the construction of the language must be altered too. If manufacturers and publishers do not take special care, it is easy to unwittingly become an accomplice of cultural imperialism.
For example, the Ministry of Culture’s translation into Chinese of the UN Convention on Human Rights of the Child, throughout the entire document, uses the Chinese word for “message,” xinxi (信息), rather than xunxi (訊息), which is the word commonly used in Taiwan.
It is not strange that when libraries in Taiwan purchase books for their collections, they often accidentally buy books that have not been properly converted into Taiwan’s form of Mandarin.
In a free and open democratic society, the government cannot examine printed materials prior to publication and sale, and doing so would impinge upon freedom of expression.
As a consequence, the decisions teachers make today in the reading materials they select for their students will determine whether Taiwan’s unique version of Mandarin will be preserved for the next generation.
For centuries, the Academie Francaise has striven to preserve the purity of the French language. Perhaps France offers a model for emulation.
Lee Jowquen teaches civics at a Taipei high school.
Translated by Edward Jones
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