When I was trying to find a counter-part for BBC's article Tracksuited guardians of the flame on CCTV's website (which gracefully cannot display correctly with my Firefox), I was attracted by the link to "the technical details on the official TV signal for the Torch Relay" (translated from 火炬接力官方电视信号参数). I wanted to see if it was possible for me to get a longer video than the glimpses I get from national television, but I was surprised by the terrible page at the other side of the link: http://www.cctv.com/2008/schedule.shtml.
The page is bilingual in Chinese (Simp) and English; however, it is illegal for average Chinese citizens to receive satellite signals without permission, so Chinese version is basically useless. The English version is just a translation of the Chinese one and like most Chinese government documents, it begins with useless formalities and leaves the most important information to the end, which is not common in English writing. As usual, there are a number of grammatical errors, strange expressions and ultra-long sentenses. Just listing some:
- The 1st paragraph, which is a sentence of 87 words (467 letters).
- ...during the ... period ... inside and outside of China (outside 21 days, inside 97days).
- ...the relay will be passed from May 4 to August 8...
- BOCOG (unclaimed acronym)
- The distribution will be no encryption.
To upset me further, CCTV removed the page at the end of the link 2008 Beijing Olympic Torch Relay World Feeds Schedule(GMT), which means the only way to get the information is to guess 下载 means download and install Microsoft Excel.
I then followed the link to the CCTV Beijing Olympic site (http://intl.2008.cctv.com) and noticed that in most pages the link to Spanish and French version were displayed like Espa?ol | Fran?ais. The page's source code told me why: the page is encoded with the Chinese codeset GB2312, which do not contain the special characters for Spanish and French!
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