Would you vote for sticky rice?
Posted by Moonage on 27 Jun 2007 | Tagged as: Political Correctness
This is amusing, and stupid.
But there’s more than a little lost in translation, according to Galvin.
The article goes on to point out the problems converting names to Chinese encounters such as Mitt Romney becoming “Sticky Rice” and Fred Thompson becoming “Virtue Soup”. Now, the problem I see immediately is a lot of these voters won’t know one from the other. So, given two unknowns, which would you rather have, sticky rice or virtue soup? No one really likes sticky rice. It artificially creates a bias against a candidate. That is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Secondly, as far as I can tell without doing any real research, neither Romney nor Thompson, nor any of the presidential candidates are Chinese names in the first place. So why bother translating the names? This is stupid, stupid, stupid. If these voters haven’t been in an English speaking country long enough to at least recognize words using Roman letters such as “STOP”, “MERGE”, “VOTE HERE”, “SALE”, or “CAUTION”, they don’t need to be voting in the first place.
Political correctness just takes any normal situation and screws it up. I bet you, if Romney or Thompson appealed to any of these voters, they’d recognize his name on a ballot. In English. Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin’s the only one who seems to have the intent of the initiative correct. He wants to leave the names in Roman letters, but print the INSTRUCTIONS in Chinese. That actually makes a lot of sense. However, I’m sure even he will get tired when every dialect on the planet expects their ballots presented the same way.
How’s about we just print them in English and expect the voter to know how to read rudimentary English?
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