HTC Executives Arrested Over Leaked Trade Secrets 41
An anonymous reader writes "Three HTC executives have been arrested on suspicion of leaking corporate secrets. From the article: Taipei prosecutors confirmed that HTC vice president of product design Thomas Chien, research and development director Wu Chien-Hung and senior manager of design and innovation Justin Huang were arrested on Friday. Mr Chien and Mr Chien-Hung remain in custody, while Mr Huang was released on bail, prosecutors office spokesman Mou Hsin Huang said. The executives were also accused of making false commission fee claims totaling around T$10m ($221,000). No further details about the allegations were immediately available.'"
Re:Them names. (Score:5, Interesting)
It looks like the article got the guy's name backwards. In Chinese, your family name comes first. So, "Wu Chien-Huang" would be properly westernized as "Mr. Wu". If, in fact, his family name were "Chien-Huang", is proper Romanized representation would be "Chien-Huang Wu".
Complicating the westernization of Chinese names, Chinese relies heavily upon inflection (so much so, that the various inflections are called "tones"). Think of the various ways you can say "Merry Christmas" to someone, expressing the entire range of feelings from "Greetings! I hope you're enjoying your holiday season" to "Fuck you, eat shit, and die!" using the same two words, depending upon how you say them.
The net result is that tens of thousands of name-syllables, represented by distinct characters in Chinese, get collapsed down to just a few hundred Roman letter sequences. Under the BEST circumstances (properly rendered into canonical Pinyin, tone accents and all), each syllable still has an ambiguity of ~2.5 characters per syllable (ie, each syllable, like "Wu", "Chien", or "Huang" could be one of 2 or 3 different Chinese characters). Strip away the accents & take liberties with the phonetics, and it's more like 5-20 per syllable. But wait... it gets worse. Just about every word in Chinese ALSO has multiple homonyms -- words that are pronounced the same, but written differently. Think, "to, too, two".
So... given only an ASCII-Romanized representation of a name like "Wu Chien-Huang", you can reasonably guess that Mr. Wu's actual name is one of approximately 20-30 possibilities. Maybe as few as a dozen, if you spend some time researching his family tree and can get the family name unambiguously nailed down to one or two possibilities (ie, figuring out whether it's "///Wu///", or "***Wu***"). But without actually seeing it written in proper Chinese, or asking his mother, or someone who saw his name written in proper Chinese at some point in time), NOBODY could ever be 100% sure what name his mother intended him to have.