Unsimplication errors

[zhwj]

I recently had a translation job that was a traditional-character version (Taiwan publisher) of a work written by a mainland author, most likely in simplified characters.

Two things:

1) 半響: Is this the standard traditional version of 半晌? I've seen 半饷 (simplified, and its traditional counterpart) in some places, too.

2) 岳飞 was written with 嶽飛. I'm fairly sure that the People's Hero wrote his surname 岳 even before the simplification process last century.

These seem like relatively low-level errors - are they common and not really of any significance in the overseas Chinese press sector, or was this publishing house (a fairly-well respected one, I'm led to believe) just not as careful as it should have been?

[studentyoung]

1) 半響: Is this the standard traditional version of 半晌? I've seen 半饷 (simplified, and its traditional counterpart) in some places, too.

Sorry to tell you that “晌shang3” has no difference between the tradition version and its simplified one. 半晌means “short time in a day”. The simplified version of “響” is “响”, which means “sound”; and the traditional version of “饷” is “餉”, which means “salary for army or policeman”.

2) 岳飞 was written with 嶽飛. I'm fairly sure that the People's Hero wrote his surname 岳 even before the simplification process last century.

I don’t feel surprised for your description. All I can tell you is that it is really a long story.

There are basically four ways to simplify a character, 1. taking the most simplest version among all its traditional versions, 2 borrowing or referring to some simple Kanji from Japanese, 3. create a new and simple version, 4 borrowing or referring some simple versions from the 行书 version or 草书 version of a character.

The link below is an article for your reference.

http://cache.baidu.com/c?word=%BC%F2%BB%AF%D7%D6&url=http%3A//www%2Enanfangdaily%2Ecom%2Ecn/southnews/tszk/nfdsb/whzg/200603200497%2Easp&b=48&a=17&user=baidu

These seem like relatively low-level errors - are they common and not really of any significance in the overseas Chinese press sector, or was this publishing house (a fairly-well respected one, I'm led to believe) just not as careful as it should have been?

I think that to standardize the simplification of Chinese characters is a long term and dynamic course, and some unexpected cases are always waiting for us to handle. What’s more, a lot of people prefer to use computer to simplify those traditional version, which has been proved that a lot of errors exist in some current Chinese characters programs that lead to a lot of errors. And some publishing houses employ some “so-so” proof-readers in order to save money is also one of the main cause for this problem.

Thanks!