TED Community » Calvin Chun-yu Chan

Bioinformatics Software Developer at UBC. HCI, Usability, UX, IxD, Visual/Industrial Design, Typography, Photography. I heart Mac and Helvetica.

Technology,Industrial Design,Interaction Design,Interactive,User Experience,Usability, Sustainability,Tangible Interface

Knowledge should be shared, not kept secret.

Web development, programming, user experience, industrial design, graphic design

TEDCred score: +32.00 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.
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A reply on Talk: Shai Agassi: A new ecosystem for electric cars

May 29 2009: Lee: I like this video too. I am a Chinese speaker and love to share the knowledge with other people who speak that language. Will try to contribute to the open translation program.
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A comment on Talk: Jay Walker on the world's English mania

May 27 2009: I have a tiny example of English-mania in China. It is a screenshot from a Chinese online dictionary site with some ad-words on the page. For non Chinese readers, I added some translation notes.
link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepu/3570624305/

As you can imagine, this site is targeting people who are interested in learning English. From the ad-words you can feel the desperateness of the Chinese people to learn the language. Their motivation may be complex: it is a tool to climb up the life-quality ladder. They want to make connections with foreigners. They don't mind to take shortcuts and ad-hoc methods (you really think you can learn the language in 5 mins?). I like this one particularly:

Watch %u9A6C%u4E91 and learn "Shanzhai English"
(reference of %u9A6C%u4E91: http://baike.baidu.com/view/16360.htm)
(reference of the word Shanzhai: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai)

There are many things and complex emotions you can learn from that 20 characters of ad-word.