Her Former

While doing research yesterday I landed on the website of HiSilicon, which "provides" chips "and solutions"¹ for communications and digital-media companies. On the About Us page I slipped on a truly odd patch of prose:

HiSilicon Technologies Co., Ltd. was established in October 2004. Her former, ASIC Design Center of Huawei Technologies, was founded in 1991. With her headquarter in Shenzhen of China, Hisilicon has set up design divisions in Beijing, Shanghai, Silicon Valley (USA) and Sweden.

Let's break it down:

• Name of company spelled two ways, HiSilicon and Hisilicon.

• Company referred to with feminine pronoun her.

• Adjective former used without a corresponding noun.

• Headquarters missing its final s.

• Needless of between city name and China.

Of all these quirks, the one that most baffles me is the feminine pronoun, which substitutes throughout the web content for the company name. Another example, also from About Us (About Her?): "She always aims to provide high quality chip solutions with good services and quick response to customers' request." Yep, she's quite a gal!

I've read quite a few Mandarin-to-English translations, and I've seen plenty of examples of Chinglish, but I've never come across this sort of genderfication. Can anyone explain? Is it equivalent to calling a ship she? Or does it result from a specific misunderstanding of English grammar rules? 

There's more odd prose on the Human Resource page (singular, like "headquarter"), which offers creative spelling ("recruitement"), suspicious enthusiasm ("Now there are dozens of vacancies waiting to be filled!"), and familiar verbosity ("With the guidance of our company's vocational qualification standards, the drive of the qualification authentication and the support from the training platform, our employees can continuously improve their working competencies and realize their career dreams step by step.")

There's also a link for something called Social Recruitment that turns out not to be a link at all (ha! fooled you with the blue type!) and whose name made me wonder whether there'd been a company-wide party to which I hadn't been invited. Then I clicked on "Job Titles" and was delivered to a page titled Society Recruitment. That sounded even better than a party invitation! Can't you picture Mrs. Snoot-Lockjaw turning to Mr. Snoot-Lockjaw and saying, "Darling, that Lowborn couple seem awfully nice. Shall we sponsor their membership in the country club?"

Alas, it turned out to be just a bunch of job listings for various types of engineers. Not only is that not Society, it's hardly—with all due respect to the engineers reading this—even social.
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¹ I'm sure you've noticed that to stay in business nowadays everyone has to "provide solutions." Not make, not sell: provide. How philanthropic! And not stuff: solutions. I picture a buffet table laden with bowls of brine, simple syrup, soapy water, and Tabasco. Chips in solutions: mmmm. Alternatively: oh noes, my chips has dissolved!

Comments

[Jessica]

That's truly one to treasure - thank you for the chuckles. And now, off to contemplate dining solutions for the evening.

[Nick]

I'm having a solution to my stress solution. Hmm, seems to be working.

Thank you

[Virtual Linguist]

It sounds to me as if the Chinese has been translated by someone who knows French better than English. 'Company' in French is 'société' (grammatical gender is feminine).

Funnily enough, although we don't call companies 'she', business terms in English are often 'feminine' eg mother company or sister company. The BBC and ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) are both affectionately known as Auntie.

There's no grammatical gender in Chinese, so perhaps they find the whole concept confusing.

[Vera]

My boss is Chinese (from Shanghai) and he often says "he" when he means "she" and vice versa. He is usually aware when he does this and corrects himself. I asked him about this once, and he said that in Chinese, there are words for "he" and "she", but they are pronounced exactly the same (they're written with different characters), so I guess he's mentally translating on the fly when he's speaking English and since the sound in Chinese is the same, he sometimes chooses the wrong equivalent.

In any case, calling a company either "he" or "she" sounds quite odd to English ears (it should be "it"), where our nouns aren't "gendrified" (cf. Mark Twain's "The Awful German Language"). Perhaps they just picked one at random and decided to be consistent in using it...?

[Vera]

Sorry for the double post.

I think it's interesting how transplanted people's native grammar asserts itself in their second language. My former boss is from Iran and speaks Farsi as his first language, in which they apparently don't use articles. When he speaks he either leaves them out, or puts them in where they're not needed (over-compensating). My Russian relatives do this too (the Russian language also operates sans articles).

Steven Pinker, anyone?

[Nancy Friedman]

@Vera and @Virtual Linguist: Very enlightening--thanks!

An aside about pronouns: my father, whose first language was Hebrew, frequently called women "he," probably because the phoneme for "she" in Hebrew is, in fact, pronounced "he." There are many of these Hebrew-English false friends: in Hebrew, "who" means "he," "me" means "who," "dove" means "bear," and "dog" means "fish." (Very, very rough transliterations, but the pronunciations are truly almost indistinguishable.)