Yesterday we heard it again in the news. China is ready to give cheap money to Europe. That’s not new. Previously China has offered a helping hand to Euroland with its debt crisis and I think that’s a ongoing topic whenever Chinese and European leaders meet.

The money doesn’t come for free of course. China wants to have unrestricted access to the European markets. Less trade barriers when selling products to Europe and less paperwork when Chinese companies want to establish a presence in Europe. While I do like less paperwork in general, I’m not sure if less trade barriers will be helpful for Europe. Cheap Chinese products mean lower prices in our shops, but also more competition for low wage countries in southern and eastern Europe. Essentially Europe gets money but has to give up competitiveness.

But there is also some candy in the store for learners of Chinese. China wants Europe to reduce paperwork for Chinese companies and help them to establish themselves in Europe. More Chinese companies in Europe mean two things. First more jobs in general. Second a unique opportunity for learners of Chinese, because these Chinese companies are Chinese companies, and their management probably will be Chinese. And who else could be a better choice than a European with Chinese skills to make sure communication between Chinese managers and European employees is smooth?

Sure they could send some Chinese persons who have learned English. However not everyone in Europe speaks English and when it comes to the more obscure languages of Europe I doubt China has enough people with those language skills.

If you are a Chinese learner this move will probably increase the value of your language skills. If you aren’t learning Chinese already, this might be a good idea to get started learning Chinese.

I could blame my readers, but I have to blame myself. The last posts have been very thoughtful, and I do enjoy that, however they haven’t been very successful in terms of number of readers. And I do know that. The statistics tell me, that since I started this blog shallow posts had a good ROI. Instructional posts are second best. While I do write this blog for exchanging ideas, I also want to learn about digital media. And there was not much learning about the digital media part recently. Therefore, I want to move to some more mainstream topics in the coming weeks and months.

Just in case anyone is curious, here is a selected list of highly rated gems. Posts that have been rewarded by my readers with lots of visits. They might be not that thoughtful however.

• Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang
• Sexy Liu Mengjun
• Chengdu Nightlife

Personally I don’t believe in the social hype. What does social really mean? I’m talking about social in the context of the new Web 2.0 websites and certain products. Does it mean: We give you some crap and therefore we take ownership of all your private data and then sell it? That’s how I see it.

I once learned, that a translator has to try to achieve two objectives:

1. Stay true to the original text
2. Translate in a way the meaning is NOT lost during the translation process.

Making a translation true to the original is easy. Making sure the meaning of the original is not lost is more difficult. Whoever set up those rules probably meant: Translate in a way the meaning as intended by the original author is NOT lost during the translation process, even if the original meaning is a intended to mislead the reader. Yay!

Here is the original bugger:
Music made social – BBM Music is a cloud-based, social music service that allows you to share and discover music with your friends, creating a continually evolving music library:

and a few lines later they state how SOCIAL they are:

Monthly fee: $US 4.99

“Have you ever met someone who learned Chinese successfully simply because a boss told him or her so? I haven’t.”

While my answer is not exactly a yes, it’s close.

While at school I learned English and Latin as foreign languages. English proved to be useful, Latin didn’t. After graduating from school, life becomes more serious. Comparing myself to others I realized, that a lot of people here speak at least two more or less useful foreign languages. Looking at my CV with English being the only foreign language was a bit depressing.

So I decided I have to learn another language. At that time I wasn’t interested in China. I wasn’t to interested in any other country, so I made my decision purely on an economical basis. I needed a second foreign language to make my CV competitive. I wanted to learn something that had a good ratio of time invested vs. expected progress and it should be a language with a good amount of native speakers. Spanish seemed perfect. It’s close to English, has easy grammar and it is the third widely spoken language after Chinese and English.

It was a pathetic failure. After one year I could barely ask someone for their name. So I gave up, but the issue with the CV was still unsolved. At that point I had thought about Chinese for a few months. Language with highest number of native speakers, it doesn’t have word flexions, one of my main concerns with spanish, and Chinese women don’t look that bad after all. I decided to give it a one semester chance. It was supposed to be among the hardest languages out there and I needed something for my CV in the not to distant future. After one semester of lazy learning, I could ask a person in Chinese, what is their name, if they are hungry, how old they are and many other things. I even could understand their reply. Chinese is so much better than Spanish.

My love for the Chinese language developed afterwards. Initially my decision was mostly driven by economic considerations. There are people out there, who start learning a language because of economic concerns.

Furthermore, while attending classes of Chinese, I did meet a few people, who learned Chinese because their boss told them to do so. Don’t know if each of them made / will make it until the fluent stage, but they put in some efforts. Maybe they liked the language as well after they started learning.

To my readers:
When you started learning Chinese (or some other language), how important was the economic aspect?

The article says, that the people in charge for the banner relied on Google Translate. This makes me wonder. How can anyone possibly rely on Google Translate? Everyone knows Google Translate can only translate the most simple text. But then I think, that the guy who made this decision is probably monolingual. I sometimes translate text from English to German. And every time I deal with people who are monolingual it can become really painful.

I remember one customer who asked my how much the translation of a text costs. So I told him and it was to expensive for him. Guess what he suggested then…. He said that he could use Google Translate and then I only need to proofread it for a cheaper price. I first considered writing some offensive words, but then realized it was not worth my time typing any more text for this person and I just quit my Skype.

When do people realize, Google Translate does not work for anything more complicated than “Hello! How are you?” … Wait a moment…. Google Translate even fails this one.

WordPress has changed the playing field of web pages. With wordpress a dream has come true. Easy to install, full of features, SEO friendly and a meanignfull heading structure.

Wait…. have you checked the html code that your wordpress theme produces? This selfwritten wp theme does something that 99% of all currently available wp themes do. The h1-tag is used for the name of the blog, in my case that’s “Junjie’s China blog”. That makes sense to some degree if you are on the front page and look at a list of articles. It makes no sense at all if you open a certain article, like this one you are reading right now.

If you printed out this article about heading markup in html, would you say that the title is “Junjie’s China blog” or would you say, that the title is “h1 and document title issues”. I think we can all agree that the latter is correct. If this is true, then “Junjie’s China blog” should not be enclosed in h1-tags, instead the title or topic of this document should be honored with h1-tags.

But what to do with the name of the blog? Will it at least get an h2? The W3C has some answers: Using h1-h6 to identify headings. Ah well, then everything is nice, isn’t it? I don’t think so. The W3C is beating around the bush with their recommendation. h-tags are clearly meant to give documents a structure. While giving a h2 to the blog name doesn’t seem that bad, there are other parts where the recommendation fails miserably. Html headings are meant to give structure to a document in a semantic sense. Giving that h2 to “Junjie’s China blog” is acceptable, because this is not anyones take on the topic, it’s Junjie’s view on this topic. Giving h2 to the navigation however doesn’t make sense at all. h1 should be the main title of a document, while h2 shall be used for all the important main points. “Navigation” and “Archives” are not main points within most documents, in fact they are only “boilerplate” content. Therefore it would be a nightmare to the idea of a semantic web to enclose them in h2-tags. Clearly, the html standard is lacking some tags.

WAI ARIA has been recommended by some people, but I feel that is more of a workaround than a real solution. Especially because there is a lot of extra work involved when using WAI ARIA.

The reader of a website doesn’t see if a heading uses h1 or h2 or h3. All he cares is that the important things are bigger and the other stuf is smaller. Naturally heading-tags express this relation and that is fine. Search engines like google on the other hand heavily depend on these tags to structure the information on a page and if the heading structure is fine for google, then I will receive more hits from it. Furthermore, I really want to support the idea of a semantic web, because I think that’s the way the internet should be.

What can we do?
I’m currently writing my own blank-theme for wordpress and I want to get this right. There are a number of blank themes out there, all open source, but most if not all of them do not adress the heading issue properly (besides some other issues). This is one of the major reasons why I want to create my own blank-theme. I’ve been reading material concerning this issue all afternoon and so far haven’t found a nice solution. But I do want to build something, that is at least acceptable.

Here is what I want to do:

• the visual sizes of headings should lead the reader of the website
• meanignful html heading structure, meaningful in the semantic sense

There is a chance I might just end up doing it like everyone else does it, but at least I want to take a moment and think this through.

Any advice welcome. If you have stumbled onto this previously, please let me know what you have done about it.

Update:
John Chow does it pretty much the way I want it for myself. Have a look into his html code of the blog overview and then of a single post. Very nice.

However when I create a theme and pass it on to other people, they probably expect it to be the same like all the other themes. So for other people I will do the usual h1-tag for blog name style. Unless they tell me they want something better

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MKL has lol cats, but Junjie is still Nyaning with the Nyan Cat