Re: The Art of Tea, Issue #2

On May 1, 10:35 am, artofteamagaz...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Dear Friends,

We sincerely apologize for any typos on our website. Many of these
issues were addressed in the "From the Readers" section of issue two.
Remember that many of the foreign authors, editors and contributors
work on a volunteer basis simply to share this information with tea
lovers worldwide. Also, the formatters, computer designers and layout
designers of the magazine itself (in fact almost all the staff) do not
speak any English at all. So you can see what an effort it is to bring
information that has been captured and reported in Chinese only for
hundreds of years to an English audience. Sometimes errors that are
corrected by the Western editor get missed on the computer because the
programmer doesn't speak English. Before this effort, almost all the
in-depth books and articles written by the key names in the tea world
were exclusively in Chinese. We worked very hard to make the second
issue an improvement over the first, and we feel that we were
genuinely successful in that endeavor. The articles are more polished
with less typos, errors or even awkward sentences. Much of this
required the development of unique strategies to solve problems like
the one mentioned above, where errors caught by the editors weren't
getting changed on the electronic side. With the exception of
questions/comments/emails, the website has so far been maintained by a
portion of our Taiwanese staff. Why? Because we want to devote more of
the energy time and limited resources of both our paid and volunteer
Western staff to improving the magazine itself. Many of us here that
have studied tea for many years were forced to learn Chinese to be
able to read or learn anything when we did. The very attempt to begin
learning about an art steeped in a culture, history and language other
than one's own should make one more tolerant to some communication
problems.

Also, remember that thousands of copies of this magazine are sold in
Asia, and only hundreds in the West. Our readers are primarily in
Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, China and Hong Kong. This doesn't
mean we wish to ignore the West, as our free tea meeting this summer
demonstrates; the point is that it wouldn't be correct to assume that
we are focused exclusively on a Western audience. Most of our readers
are in fact Chinese, their first language is even Chinese, but they
can't read or write because they attended English schools. Such people
were ecstatic about the release of an English magazine and the
opportunity to hear the voices of the experts.

Being honest about our difficulties here is not an attempt to excuse
mistakes. We have every intention to continue to improve our magazine,
website, information, etc. We will of course try to incorporate more
Western help, both professionally and as volunteers, as the magazine
continues to expand. We also have the same goals as what you are
calling attention to here, viz., to make the magazine, website, etc.
as great an English resource as possible. We have plans to make the
entire Puerh-teapot forum/blogs, where many tea lovers, authors and
experts are already discussing tea in Chinese, available to our
English audience. We are also working on a second English website that
will solve some of the shipping problems associated with the English
magazine. Also, three books are currently in the process of
translation and will become available this year, including the Puerh
reference albums for various years.

We thank you for your criticism and hope that you continue to help us
improve. We have already scheduled a chance to sit down with the
website engineers and fix some of the problems there. In the future,
please submit your comments or questions to us directly via our
website.

Regards
Ethan
Editor

Personally, I echo Phyll's hope that Wushing publications should do a
better job proofing the English magazine, but moreover, extend this
care to everything it publishes. The English magazine has quite a few
typos/errors in them, but even the Chinese publications suffer from
the not-so-occasional misprint, ranging from wrong picture for caption
to simple typographical errors. I recall a particularly bad one in
one of your puerh books (the ones that show pictures of the wrapper/
cake and list production type/year) where, IIRC, Xiaguan is replaced
by some other factory Menghai as the factory. While the error was so
obvious that anybody reading the book would know it was an error, the
fact that it got through all the hurdles before going to press at all
is a marvel in itself.

It really shouldn't be so difficult to do a good editing job for a
quarterly, not to mention books that are meant as references.

MarshalN
http://www.xanga.com/MarshalN

.

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