Black and White Cat has a great post covering the edits made for the Beijing News Network to a syndicated New York Times article:

Volunteers with the best linguistic skills appear to have been assigned the best jobs — the indoor ones, interacting with the news media. Those less fluent were put on traffic or security detail and stand out in the smog all day.

But almost Eeveryone knows at least “Hello,” “O.K.” and “Have a good day,” so it’s possible for English-speaking visitors to have friendly conversations not much different from the ones they have in the elevator every morning back home making English speaking visitors all feel at ease.

Indeed, this is an excellent guide for demonstrating how to properly translate intrinsically biased stories, as Anglo-European languages have all sorts of ugly words (like freedom, l|berty, several pr0perty)…

To be fair: we hear all the time about state-media bias in China. When the topic comes up, I try to couch any criticisms with “well, in the U.S., some people say our media is driven by self-serving plutocrats.” For the most part, people here know that what they are reading / hearing is to some extent censored.

The extent to which differences of opinion are either: culturally dependent (ie: ’so what if the gymnasts were 14? They won’) or actually based on false beliefs is a fascinating tension I fully intend to continue exploring.