Language - Where Many Wrongs Can Become a Right

Language is a living thing.  It constantly evolves and grows with the people who use it on a daily basis.  Humans are not machines, though, therefore mispronunciations and typos are common occurrences.  We even say things that are grammatically incorrect from time to time.  One can find examples in pretty much every language in the world:

mischievous vs. mischievious 
换档 vs. 换挡

In both cases above, the phrase in bold is the correct form, but people use the latter form so much that it's become acceptable.  Dictionaries list the latter as a variant of the correct form, meaning it is non-standard but in use and accepted.  

Mistakes like those used to be easy to contain.  These days, however, technology has actually contributed to the spreading of these errors.  With the aid of new phrase learning, search suggestions, and autocomplete, a seemingly innocuous typo can earn itself a spot on the top search results in a matter of days.

So, what should people who work with words do?  

Recently I was involved in a large-scale localization project, not as a translator but as quality assurance at the final stage.  I was surprised to find that "gear" (as in transmission) had been translated as both 挡 and 档 in the glossary, which was already approved and couldn't be modified by then.  I looked them both up and yes, in Simplified Chinese it has become acceptable to use terms such as 换挡 or 手排挡.  Even though the correct phrases are 换档 and 手排档, respectively.  

Interestingly enough, in Traditional Chinese 檔 and 擋 are not interchangeable in any phrases.  And for good reason: the 木 radical in the former indicates that the word 檔 is most likely a noun, whereas the 扌 radical in the latter suggests that 擋 is most likely a verb.  Therefore, a student in Taiwan writing either 換擋 or 手排擋 will be marked as wrong.

I'm not going to say one system is better than the other.  Depending on a person's perspective, I'm sure the answer can be quite different.  One can say, for example, that Simplified Chinese is more forgiving.  Or, another can argue, that it is making people sloppier.

From the standpoint of quality, however, I think the translators should at the very least be consistent.  If you like to use the variant 挡, that's fine; but please do it across the board.  However, considering that 挡 is still non-standard, I'd suggest one stick with the correct form of 档 and stop the errors from spreading even further.


Please translate responsibly.