Reply to previous post

dear all

this is the email replied by the UN personnel regarding the issue.

my conclusion, 'UN to abolish traditional chinese' is a hoax.

----

Thanks for your enquiries regarding United Nations' abolishment of Traditional Chinese in 2008.

Early this year, someone on internet made an ungrounded claim that UN will abolish Traditional Chinese in 2008. To clarified the rumor, correspondent from Xinhua News Agency at UN interviewed a senior Chinese staff who did Chinese translation at UN for more than 30 years. At the United Nations, the Traditional Chinese was used until 1972 when GA voted the seat for China should be represented by mainland China. In 1973, all the type setting machines(Chinese typewriter) were imported from China and Simplified Chinese was the only characters on those machines. We can say that UN has been using the Simplified Chinese in all its documents since 1973.

There was no UN resolution to specify which variant of official language should be used. (Only Chinese has the Traditional vs. Simplified character problem). The consensus was that the official language should be the language which the member state used. In this case, the Simplified Chinese is used by the Chinese government. The Traditional vs Simplified sometime became political issue due to their representing. Fueled by possible political reasons, some people made the online petition. Most people think it is just a hoax.

Hope it helps.

Jianqun

Ms. WANG, Jianqun (Jane)
Information Systems Officer
Communications and Information Management Service
Department of Economic and Social Affairs (http://esa.un.org)
United Nations, New York, NY, 10017, USA
Room DC2-1428
Tel: (212) 963-3385
Fax: (212) 963-4444
E-mail: wangj@un.org

CC:ENQUIRIES: United Nations' abolishment of Traditional Chinese in 2008

To all viewers (if any):
recently there are rumours on the net regarding the UN decision to abolish/unrecognise traditional chinese and only to recognise only simplified. whilst there are many sites that will vouch so with news snippets or ref. from various sources, a search for an officialy announcement from the UN seems to turn out scarce (my lack of research ability i suppose).

Hence the following enquiry I posted to the UN on their website (screen shot as above, while a copy of it is below) in an attempt for clarify an issue, if proven true then action/petitions can be justified in a better way, otherwise it would save both parties time and put many worries to rest.

------

Could the UN or any of its revelant departments respond to the following?

Recently (since 2006) there have been rumours on the internet regarding UN's decision to officially recognise only the written simplified chinese.

Examples can be found at the following:http://www.gopetition.com/region/237/8314.html
a simple search "UN to abolish traditional chinese" reveal these results:http://www.google.com/search?q=UN+abolish+traditional+chinese&rls=com.microsoft:*:IE-SearchBox&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7GFRD

There are sentiments among chinese worldwide as both traditional and simplified chinese are used as standards in various countries, much like spanish and french in the americas and europe.

The hope of this enquiry is to clarify the issue.

Thanks,
YWC.03/06/07

--

remember to keep up the pressure (one can only do so much):

go to http://webapps01.un.org/common/isu/contactUs.do?toCode=72 to push them (or pester them) for a quicker response.