017《经济学家》读译参考之十七：告别“红兵”–中国人取名禁用生僻字.doc

TEXT 17 Farewell the red soldiers Apr 12th 2006 | BEIJING From The Economist print edition LONG gone are the days when Chinese parents often chose such names as Hongbing (Red Soldier), Aihua (Love China) or even Kangmei (Anti America) for their children. （1）They are still limited by the custom of using no more than two Chinese characters for given names. But growing numbers now prefer to choose highly obscure ones to ① the common phenomenon, given a ★paucity[1] of surnames, of ★bestowing[2] a name already used by countless others. The police, however, have plans to stop this. The problem is that commonly used software for inputting Chinese characters, including that used by police departments responsible for ② identity cards (which every Chinese must carry), cannot ③ very rare characters. In China, the usual way of writing a character on a computer is to ④ its pronunciation using Roman letters, then choose from a list of possible options (most characters have many ★homonyms[3]). A rare character might not ⑤ up on the list. The tens of millions of Chinese with rare characters in their names （2）have long suffered the consequences, experiencing problems with everything from buying airline tickets to opening bank accounts. A Chinese graduate student says none of her examination certificates has ever ⑥ her full name, Chen Minqian. The rare “min” character, a poetical term for “autumn”, has been represented by zeros or ★asterisks[4]. Many computers once had problems generating the name of Zhu Rongji, Chinas former prime minister, ⑦ to his “rong” character, which is an unusual variant of a character meaning “smelt”. For the police all this has become a particular problem with the introduction in 2004 of new identity cards with ⑧ microchips. Rather than ⑨ better software, a senior police official has announced that the answer is to ban problematic characters. （3）Reaction has not been entirely positive. One Chinese newsp