Science journal mistakenly advertises "hot, young housewives"

[ultragaijin]

http://www.fuckedgaijin.com/forums/images/vbimghost/4494fe026955f4.jpg

Eminent scientific journal gets hit for sex (http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/12/11/1228584998876.html)

One of Europe's most prestigious scientific research institutes has had to issue an apology after discovering that the calligraphy used on the cover of its flagship magazine to illustrate a special China edition was in fact an ad for a Hong Kong strip joint.

The institute hastily replaced the cover - which advertises "hot, young housewives" - from the online and English edition of the publication, Max Planck Research, but not before the German language version of the periodical had been dispatched to subscribers.

The calligraphy, which was vetted by a sinologist before publication, was believed to have "depicted classical Chinese characters in a non-controversial context".

Chinese 'classical poem' was brothel ad (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/chinese-classical-poem-was-brothel-ad-1058031.html)

[Greji]

Eminent scientific journal gets hit for sex (http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/12/11/1228584998876.html)



Chinese 'classical poem' was brothel ad (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/chinese-classical-poem-was-brothel-ad-1058031.html)

This is fucking classic! I love it.... Good thing they consulted with a resident specialist before they published...
:cool:

[Zeth3D]

That is epic

[hundefar]

Linguist blog "Language Log" (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu) has the details on this story:

Much of what actually occurred is reported by Christopher Schrader ("Jadefrauen für Max Planck") in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Nr. 288, Dec. 11, 2008, page 16). Christina Beck from the MPF obtained the Chinese text as a picture from the "Fotoagentur Visum," which is a well established agency located in Hamburg. The picture had been found under the search entry "chinesische Schriftzeichen," but when I checked last week, it was no longer there. According to my sources, what MPF did was apparently to choose a text simply for "aesthetical reasons," a matter of pure exoticism.

Now, here is the crucial point: MPF did show the text to a female "Sinologist," and I know the name of the person who is said to have looked at it before publication, but I will not reveal who she was because nothing would be gained by further embarrassing her. I shall mention only that the word "Sinologin" in German must not mean exactly the same thing that "Sinologist" does in English, namely, an accomplished philologist who specializes in Chinese, especially from earlier periods (at least that is how I have always understood it). Rather, a Sinologin might refer to someone who only knows a year or two of Modern Mandarin. This, in fact, is the case in the present instance, where the person in question is a scientist who happens to know some Chinese.

If a trick was intentionally played on anyone, it was by the photographer who supplied Visum with a salacious text without warning them about its contents. It is clear that Visum is not in the business of checking the content of the words in the photographs that they market to their customers, but offer such images only for visual qualities. I wrote to as many people as I could at Visum to find out who sold them the photograph with the text that ended up on the front cover of MPF. So far, they have not responded to my inquiries.

Of course, none of this would have happened if MPF had done the sensible thing and sought the advice of some of the real Sinologists who work in, for example, the History of Science Institute at MPI. I know a couple of them (Dagmar Schäfer and Martina Siebert) who are very sharp and have excellent Chinese reading skills; they would never have been hoodwinked into thinking that such a sloppy advertisement was a classical poem.

More here.. (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=969)