For some people, today is a very special holiday for family, football, and good eating—otherwise known as Thanksgiving in America. For most people, however, today is just the day before the day before the weekend. More likely than not, this second group of people will have received a barrage of well-meaning e-mails over the past few days, wishing them a happy Thanksgiving.

In response, although some folks might admonish their American brethren for being culturally Americentric, we suggest that you take this opportunity to employ the fourth most-used phrase among English speakers in 2010 and declare this a “teachable moment” in which you can talk about other Thanksgiving-esque holidays from around the globe.

As a Friday treat, I thought I’d take this opportunity to teach an interesting Chinese phrase to all of our friends and fellow logophiles out there in cyberspace.

A while back, I talked about the phrase 马后炮 (mă hòu pào), which is essentially a way of telling someone to shove it when they scold you for an event or situation that’s too late to avoid. (One of our readers suggested an English translation of “No use crying over spilled milk,” which I think is pretty appropriate.) In that same entry, we discussed how the Chinese language is chock-full of metaphorical idioms (called chengyu, or 成语) pulled from ancient stories and literature, which are used to offer concise insight into common experiences or situations.

Today, I’d like to talk about another one of my favorite Chinese idioms: 刻舟求剑 (kè zhōu qiú jiàn). To take this phrase character by character, 刻 (kè) means to carve or engrave, a 舟 (zhōu) is a boat, 求 (qiú) is a verb meaning to seek, and 剑 (jiàn) means sword. Put them all together, and this phrase literally means “to mark (or put a notch on) the boat to find one’s sword.” But what the heck does that mean? Read on a bit and it’ll make more sense, I promise.

Tomorrow is the 15^th day of the eighth lunar month, which means that the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节) has arrived here in China. It usually coincides with the autumnal equinox, one of only two occasions in the year when the length of night and day are nearly equal.

Like a fair amount of Chinese holidays, the Mid-Autumn Festival is also a posthumous celebration of bitter-sweet romance. (Check out our last entry on the Qixi Festival for another example of this.) There’s a lot of disagreement about the specifics behind the Mid-Autumn Festival, but most accounts agree that there once was a totally amazing, Chuck Norris-like archer named Houyi (hoe-ee) who, in typical awesome-hero fashion, had a beautiful wife named Chang’e (chong-uh).

The following is the mythology behind the Mid-Autumn Festival recreated for you in 10 easy-to-digest bullet points.

In celebration of a long-awaited Friday, I thought it might be fun to teach ya’ll a little Chinese. If you enjoy this kind of thing, maybe we can do it more often.

This won’t be a Chinese lesson—not in the grammatical and learn-new-vocabulary sense. Rather, I wanted to share the history behind an interesting phrase. For those who aren’t familiar with the Chinese language, it’s uniquely possessed of many, many metaphorical idioms (often consisting of four characters) that derive from ancient stories and literature. Everyday conversations are literally teeming with these sayings, which often offer concise insight into a common experience or situation.

The phrase I’d like to focus on today is 马后炮 (mă hòu pào), which literally means “a canon behind the horse.” In colloquial use, when you tell someone not to canon-behind-the-horse you, it means that an incident has already occurred. You can’t change it, so there’s no use bringing it up. This phrase is especially useful when responding to I-told-you-so situations in which someone scolds you, or offers a post hoc solution to something that has already happened, and is thereby unavoidable.

But what does this have to do with horses and canons? Oddly enough, the phrase comes from Chinese Chess. Here’s some quick background information:

Guest blog entry by Robert Derbyshire, Technical Writer and TermWiki Commandant.

Everyone is well used to criticizing English speakers for their awful foreign language skills. I remember speaking to a guy from Norway a few years ago about the languages he studied at school. He said Swedish, German and French. I asked him “what about English?” He replied in passing, “Oh, we’re expected to be fluent in that by middle school.”

He failed to mention that they were expected to be fluent in a foreign language by age of 15. In the UK, foreign languages have been in retreat for years. Six years ago, after the government made language study optional after age 14, language uptake at GCSE level (age 15-16) has dropped by a third.

While I’d love to flex my British blogging wings and have a good old moan about life, the universe and everything, for the moment I’d like to explore some of the unusual moral dilemmas that an English native speaker faces when he or she actually decides to walk upstream and try to learn a foreign language.

It’s the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, folks, and that means it’s time for the Qixi (chee shee) festival here in China. “Qixi” literally means “The Seventh Evening” (some say “Night of Sevens,” but I don’t agree with that translation), a holiday a little bit like the Chinese version of Valentine’s Day in the west. Because it’s a Chinese holiday, though, it’s a lot more sweet and sour than its straight-out sweet American counterpart.

There are many different stories behind the origins of this holiday. Most explanations are pretty much the same, with the exception of a few minor details. In typical businessblog-like fashion, I’ll give you the story in a nutshell (brought to you in only 10 bullet points!).

Guest blog entry by Melissa Taing, a marketing intern at CSOFT

Five years ago, I went to Cambodia and was overwhelmed by how much of my life still remains there. Granted, “life” is used in the broadest sense of the word, as it really was my parents’ lives that started there.

As a product of these two Cambodian-born, ethnically Chinese Americans (say that five times fast), I now have a permanent visa into the country, free access to most temples and tourist attractions, and dozens upon dozens of aunts, uncles, cousins, half-siblings, nieces, nephews… you name it, they’re there. My first visit flew by in a blur as new faces appeared daily, as we custom-made traditional Cambodian outfits, and as I struggled to memorize the entire Cambodian segment of my family tree.

What’s even more interesting than traveling somewhere for the first time, though, is returning there for a second time.

The theme of CSOFT’s 2010 Worldwide Summit was “The Power of Language”—something that, more than an amoebic catchphrase meant to imbue the event with meaning, really does have an application at our office and in the localization industry as a whole. But not in the way that you might think.

As a localization service provider, language is naturally something with which we are intimately involved. (Can I get a “Duh” here, please?) In the case of our Summit, however, the focus was not on translation, transcreation, nor on multilingual terminology management. These topics, though apropos, are entirely too symptomatic in their approach improving best practices in the localization industry.

More germane to our internal processes at CSOFT is the idea that language, as a powerful phenomenon, has an immeasurably huge effect on company culture, production behavior, and how we work together. Specifically, as we work in an industry with a heavy emphasis on project management, the ways in which we define our roles, communicate, delegate, and interact with both clients and internal staff alike can make or break the quality of a localization project.

To drive this message home in an ancillary manner, our sneaky President and CEO, Shunee Yee, hosted an art exhibit during CSOFT’s annual Friday Night Party, in which she portrayed through her own private collection of art the lasting effect that language has had on Chinese culture, art, and society as a whole.