Steve Minutillo :: messy-78messy things

2 Comments

zonble zonble  

December 10th, 2004
REPLY))

Well, there are two common translation of the word ‘blogger’, one is “博客” (Bo Ke) which is popular in Mainland Chinese, while another one is “部落格” (Bu Lo Ge) which is popular in Taiwan and Hong-Kong, especially in Taiwan.

The controversies among ‘I am not a Bo Ke’ is because of, I guess, some Chinese bloggers such as Issac Moa consider that ‘Bo Ke’ can not represent the Chinese bloggers comprehensively, ‘Bo Ke’ is only a creation of Fan Xing Dong, who is the founder of the blogchina dotcom. Therefore they want to ask the Western medium not to use ‘Bo Ke’ to interpret the Chinese bloggers. They think they are just bloggers but not ‘Bo Ke’, and ask to be call bloggers just in English.

Another translation ‘Bu Lo Ge’ means ‘Tribal Boxes’. You know, to lots of Chinese writers, there is much meaning in 格(Ge) such a word. We use to write Chinese on paper drawn with boxes and write each Chinese character into each box, that made easy to count how many words you ever wrote before computers and word processing softwares became popular. We often call writing as ‘Climbing on the Boxes’ (爬格子). The ‘Tribal Boxes’ cound be understood as small-raged, private and personal writing spaces.

I remember that a Japanese blogger interpret the difference of the phenomena of blogging in Mainland China and Taiwan just based on the two different translation. He wrote tribal means distributed, that’s why there are less centered blog hosting service in Taiwan than Mainland China. Such a interpretation is interesting, however, I do not think this interpretation just because of the meaning of the words is correct.

1^F




stevesteve  

December 10th, 2004
REPLY))

Ah, thanks. I have even posted about that before, but I couldn’t find it in my archives. Jenny also remembered that you had used “Bu Lo Ge” on your site for blogger, but we couldn’t find that either, late last night.

2^F