Mainland Chinese youths launch Facebook campaign to support Hong Kong protesters(Charlotte Lee)

South China Morning Post

Mainland Chinese youths launch Facebook campaign to support Hong Kong protesters

From Chen Yifei and Raquel Carvalho

Pro-democracy demonstrations have entered the seventh day. Not only thousands of Hongkongers still strive for democracy through remained on the street, but also lots Mainlanders were supporting the protester by setting up a page in Facebook, even in Weibo, one of the social networking site which under the China supervision.

I choose this news because it completely related Bilingual Cyber Culture and it related the events happened recently in Hong Kong.

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A screenshot of the facebook page of Mainlanders support Hong Kong.

In the beginning, this picture was captured from Facebook. From this picture and the description, these can clearly clarify that it included the Translation bilingual elements. It translate 內地生撐香港 into “ Mainlanders support Hong Kong”. The meaning of the name does not change at all.

Also, in the first paragraph,

A Facebook page was set up on Wednesday by a group of mainlanders seeking to support the ongoing "Umbrella Revolution" in Hong Kong.

“Umbrella Revolution” which means “雨傘革命”, but “Umbrella Revolution” are actually called “遮打革命” in Hong Kong because the protesters use umbrella(遮) to resist the pepper spray attack which were thrown by police in Chater Road(遮打道). It translated the word but cannot translate all meaning of the whole word. So it also included re-writing elements.

There still have another example of translation and transliteration

Mainlanders support Hong Kong was set up initially in response to a photo campaign conducted on the Wechat account of “Hong Kong Drifters Circles” (Gangpiaoquan), an online community popular among recent mainland immigrants to Hong Kong.

Gangpiaoquan is the transliteration of 港漂圈. It used pinyin to express 港漂圈 this three word into Gangpiaoquan. If the foreigner read this word, they won’t know what Gangpiaoquan is, even HongKongers may not know too. So the publishers translated it into “Hong Kong Drifters Circles” to help the foreigners understand the word more easily.

“We persuaded people who are now on the mainland not to post their photos [of themselves]. We don’t want to put them in trouble,” she said. “People have been detained in Shenzhen for showing support.”

Except Gangpiaoquan, Shenzhen is also another example of transliteration. Transliteration always appear in the passage which mentioned Chinese region, name such as “TianAnMen Square”, “Beijing”, “Leung Chun-Ying” etc. due to the difficulties of translating the region and people names. Or let foreigners know the way of saying the region, name and increase the authenticity.

In Paragraph 10, it mentioned a word - hashtag. People who use or used Twitter, Weibo, Instagram know it. It uses to describe a general subject on Twitter, weibo etc. Actually, this word did not existed before Twitter establised. If you search this word in traditional dictionary, you never find this word. On the contrary, you can find it if you search it in cambridge dictionary, google translate etc. since the establishment of twitter, people started to use Hash to give their tweet a tag and even created a trend in the world. So "Hashtag" appeared after twitter were established.

Although there are lots of bilingual elements in the news, there are cyber elements too.

The Gangpiaoquan Weibo account invited its more than 50,000 subscribers to share their thoughts on “What’s happening in Hong Kong” under the hashtag “I live in Hong Kong and I have something to say.”

An initial post that launched the Gangpiaoquan campaign showed a dozen people holding banners with slogans that read “I want to focus on study”, “Keep calm and carry on”, and “I want to go shopping in Temple Street”. The number of participants is unknown because Wechat only allows sharing among friends.

Except the picture above shows "cyber" elements, the three words highlighted above also shows "cyber" elements and prove how "cyber" and "language" powerful are. A page, a post in Facebook, Weibo got lots of attention and aggregated the supporters, even got the media attention. 

Link: http://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1608825/mainland-facebook-campaign-launched-support-hong-kong-protesters