China ramped up its censorship considerably in the lead-up to today, both of words and Internet services. Google is by far the biggest company to find its services halted – as anyone trying to access Gmail without a VPN knows well — and Google has by far the best response to it. We really want this to be true, anyway — via Jonah Kessel:
Google apparently playing hardball with china with today’s recommended Chinese phrase of the day in Google Translate App. Can’t really be a coincidence #june4
“Harmonious society” is the government’s official vision for Chinese society, one in which everyone is part of one giant happy family and history is one big bright bouncy castle.
It’s also a hollow phrase that tries to deny reality. So yeah, we don’t really have any use for it, either.
UPDATE, 10:45 pm: As has been pointed out, Google Translate doesn’t have a “phrase of the day.” Nonetheless.
I saw this elsewhere and was really perplexed because the Google Translate App does not have a “recommended phrase of the day” feature. You can type in words or phrases, hit translate, and then click the blue translation box to take you to a screen that is that exact same screen shot. Seems kind of strange to make this up — I’m not sure what the motive is? Or maybe Jonah Kessel is confusing his search history with “recommended phrases”? Either way, this isn’t possible to replicate without typing in the phrase first.
I should clarify by “elsewhere” I mean also posted by Jonah Kessel and not another person who had similar results.
This is such a bullshit article, it’s meant to look like as if typing in “harmonious society” in Google translate results in that translation. It does not. That phrase in Chinese has the word “fuck” added to the end, so of course Google will translate into English “fuck harmonious society”.
Does the post author not read Chinese?