Yanshuang Zhang's Research Blog
草泥马 This imaginary alpaca-creature has become the de facto mascot of Chinese Internet users’ struggle for free expression and a symbol of defiance against Internet censorship. The word, sounds nearly the same as the phrase “f--- your mother” in Mandarin, and was coined in 2009 apparently to skirt censorship of vulgar content. It is also used to criticize the Chinese Communist Party, which often describes itself as the “mother of the people.”
河蟹 The phrase sounds like the word “harmony” in Mandarin, it refers to government censorship. It is widely used as a verb. Instead of saying something is censored, it is said to be “river-crabbed”. The Chinese have also created cartoon memes and songs about the grass-mud horses’ fight against the river crabs that threaten the horses’ habitat called Mahler Gobi. Mahler Gobi is a homophone for another Mandarin curse word meaning “your mother’s f---ing c---”.
APEC蓝 The unusually blue color of the sky over Beijing when the city hosted the 26th Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November 2014. To reduce the air pollution in Beijing, Chinese authorities announced a special week-long holidays for workers and students, halted construction works and banned barbecues and cremations ahead of the summit. This term also refers to the government’s tendency to put on a show for foreigners when the day-to-day reality in China is much bleaker.
草泥马 This imaginary alpaca-creature has become the de facto mascot of Chinese Internet users’ struggle for free expression and a symbol of defiance against Internet censorship. The word, sounds nearly the same as the phrase “f--- your mother” in Mandarin, and was coined in 2009 apparently to skirt censorship of vulgar content. It is also used to criticize the Chinese Communist Party, which often describes itself as the “mother of the people.”
Introduction
In early days of Chinese Internet, the cyber lexicon was usually abbreviations of normal Chinese characters or “Pinyin” (Chinese phonetic transcription), e.g. TMD ( means “fuck”), MM (means “beauty”). Now with the popularization of Internet, Chinese cyber language has become more diversified, and mainly come from sources like classic movies or TV series lines, coined terms for particular events or affairs, dialects, and homophone/code/nickname to avoid key term filtering. In some particular internet communities, there might be a special system of lexicon shared among users.
Web slang is a variation of human language under the new media circumstances. It can both reflect some natures of a particular language as well as the particular Internet culture in a particular country. Due to the language barrier, many outsiders find it difficult to learn Chinese web slang So this blog will tentatively introduce the commonly-used cyber lexicon in Chinese Mainland (Mandarin-speaking region), and hopefully help those who are interested in learning Mandarin (and its particular usage online), or doing research about Chinese linguistics or Chinese Internet culture.
It should also be noted that, Chinese is a complex ideographic language and many cyber lexicons are based on a combination of Chinese characters’ shape, meaning, pronunciation as well as its phonetic transcription system-“Pinyin”. So how to show all these features in a second language (here is English) becomes an issue. I am trying to reach the accuracy of the original Chinese text in the translation and explanation, but still a degree of subtleness and nuances between both languages would inevitably compromise to the requirement of clarity. I guess this is also a linguistic conundrum for all translation studies as well as comparative linguistics . So welcome all kinds of feedbacks- about translation, language, Chinese internet, culture…ANYTHING that could help improve and put forward this small project. Thank you.Now let’s start the journey. Have fun!