Renowned Chinese dictionary sued for errors
By Angela Xu (Shanghai Daily)
Updated: 2006-01-21 09:37

A hotel manager has filed a suit against a local bookstore for selling him a copy of one of the country's most definitive dictionaries, which he claims is riddled with errors.

Chen Dingxiang said he has found more than 3,000 mistakes in the latest version of the Xinhua Dictionary published by the Commercial Press.

He is accusing Shanghai Book City of selling a substandard publication.

"My real target is the press. But it is too troublesome for me to file a lawsuit in Beijing where the press is located. So I bought a Xinhua Dictionary in the book city and chose it as the defendant, hoping the press will get involved in this way," Chen said.

Chen is demanding the bookstore stop selling the dictionaries and give him a 33 yuan (US$4) refund for his purchase. He is also seeking a public apology and 20,000 yuan in compensation for the time he has spent on the suit.

Xinhua Dictionary, which was first published in 1953 and is revised every five years on average, is a renowned Chinese dictionary. To date, more than 400 million volumes of the dictionary have been printed.

Chen said he first found mistakes in the dictionary in 1998 and has been studying the dictionary carefully ever since.

He said he found more than 3,000 mistakes in the dictionary, covering 48 problems. In many cases, the dictionary explains a Chinese character as an adjective or other part of speech but the character is used as a different part of speech when a phrase is cited as an example.

Chen wrote two manuscripts based on his study and sent them to the Commercial Press in 2001 and 2004, asking for publication. But the press neither published the manuscripts nor returned them, he said.

"I don't care about money. It is a matter for our offsprings to study the Chinese language," Chen said.

He decided to file a lawsuit because a publication can be judged substandard if it contains more than 15 mistakes for every 10,000 words.

Managers from the bookstore said they should not be the defendant in the lawsuit.

The store didn't send a lawyer to yesterday's opening hearing in the case, and didn't provide any evidence.

Jiang Li, director of the bookstore's planning department, said the store is considering asking the court to add the press as a second defendant.

"We need more time to collect evidence because it involves a very professional problem.

We need the cooperation of the press to invite experts to judge whether Chen's opinions are right or not," Jiang said. "As a book retailer, we can only guarantee we stock books through legal channels, but we aren't able to decide the quality of each book because there isn't a standard for books that are all different in content."

Fan Xiao, who teaches Chinese at Fudan University, said many of the problems Chen raised are valid, but Mandarin is such a complicated language that it is difficult to say how many of his complaints are valid.