From online discussions to adverts, Chinese culture is full of puns. But the country’s print and broadcast watchdog has ruled that there is nothing funny about them.
互联网论坛、广告、甚至是整个中国文化里都充满了俏皮话。但是中国新闻出版广播电视总局却觉得这些俏皮话一点也不好玩。
It has banned wordplay on the grounds that it breaches the law on standard spoken and written Chinese, makes promoting cultural heritage harder and may mislead the public – especially children.
目前国家新闻出版广电总局发布新规，禁止媒体生造词语乱用成语，因为这些误用会影响文化传承，还容易误导公众——尤其是孩子。
The casual alteration of idioms risks nothing less than “cultural and linguistic chaos”, it warns.
广电总局警告媒体说不能因为肆意乱改乱用造成文化断代和语言混乱。
Chinese is perfectly suited to puns because it has so many homophones. Popular sayings and even customs, as well as jokes, rely on wordplay.
由于中国的语言体系中有许多多音字，所以非常适合使用谐音双关。许多俗语、俏皮话和风俗都和谐音有关。
But the order from the State Administration for Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television says: “Radio and television authorities at all levels must tighten up their regulations and crack down on the irregular and inaccurate use of the Chinese language, especially the misuse of idioms.”
国家新闻出版广电总局下达的规定中说各级广播电视管理部门必须强化监管力度，打击不正规不准确的汉语使用，尤其是误用成语。
Programmes and adverts should strictly comply with the standard spelling and use of characters, words, phrases and idioms – and avoid changing the characters, phrasing and meanings, the order said.
规定要求电视频道和广告必须严格遵守标准的字、词、短语、成语的拼写和使用方法——避免改变成语中的字，变换结构和意思。
“Idioms are one of the great features of the Chinese language and contain profound cultural heritage and historical resources and great aesthetic, ideological and moral values,” it added.
规定中指出成语是汉语的重要特征之一，包含着深远的文化影响和历史因素，其中不乏重要的美学、意识形态和道德价值。
“That’s the most ridiculous part of this: [wordplay] is so much part and parcel of Chinese heritage,” said David Moser, academic director for CET Chinese studies at Beijing Capital Normal University.
首都师范大学CET对外汉语学习项目的负责人莫大伟(David Moser)对此表达了自己的意见：“这项规定最荒唐的就是这点：文字游戏是中国文化重要的组成部分。”
When couples marry, people will give them dates and peanuts – a reference to the wish Zaosheng guizi or “May you soon give birth to a son”. The word for dates is also zao and peanuts are huasheng.
中国人结婚的早生贵子(枣生桂子)就是其中一个例子。
The notice cites complaints from viewers, but the examples it gives appear utterly innocuous. In a tourism promotion campaign, tweaking the characters used in the phrase jin shan jin mei – perfection – has turned it into a slogan translated as “Shanxi, a land of splendours”. In another case, replacing a single character in ke bu rong huan has turned “brook no delay” into “coughing must not linger” for a medicine advert.
规定引用了“晋善晋美”和“咳不容缓”的误用例子，但是这些例子看上去却无伤大雅。
“It could just be a small group of people, or even one person, who are conservative, humourless, priggish and arbitrarily purist, so that everyone has to fall in line,” said Moser.
Moser对此评论说：“很可能是一小部分保守的人，甚至有可能是一个保守派，这帮人没有幽默感，是死板又专横的纯粹主义者，搞得每个人都要遵守规定。”