John Pasden oversees a lot of the academic work here at CPod. But John Pasden is a busy fellow. He needs an assistant. If you are a Shanghai-based intermediate speaker of Mandarin and want to consider an internship, let us know. You’d get to work with John and the team. I think it would certainly be a learning experience. Here arew his requirements:
1. Be a native speaker of English with decent writing skills
2. Be intermediate level (at least two years of serious study)
3. Have a strong desire to improve his Chinese
4. Be well-rounded in terms of speaking/listening/reading/writing
5. Be good with computers/the internet
6. Have some grasp of academic issues
7. Be a fan of ChinesePod
Email: Chinesepod at gmail dot com
Update, Aug 11th:
I should let you know that John has found a talented assistant and will introduce her next week, so the position is no longer available. Thx for your input.
Ken Carroll
pretzellogic on 
Andrew Cockerham on 
Dave on
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Limited to people in Shanghai only? Drat. Where’s the Beijing love?
Yah, where’s the online love? Let me get those emails out of my spam folder.
Curious, how come the English writing skills? Do you expect this person to post or something? How about saying a little more about what this person might be doing? I’d hate some unsuspecting intern to show up on day one and have John say, okay — go thru all the podcasts and tag every instance of ‘δΈͺ’. Would this person be expected to answer questions about Chinese …grammar from Cpodsters?
Sounds fun. Of course I’m not in Shanghai. But I fit the other criteria…
Lantian,
> Curious, how come the English writing skills? Do you expect this person to post or something?
Maybe because decent writing skills are pretty much a minimum requirement for any job that doesn’t involve deep fryers?
Brendan,
Are you interested? The commute might get to you after a while…
Lantian,
There’s a lot of editing for this job, especially with regards to English. Some of it is translating, and you can’t write a decent English translation if you can’t write well in the first place. If the person has poor spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. it will give me more work instead of less!
Just curious…what’s the pay?
Might be, actually. Of course, I’d rather put my eyes out than move to Shanghai.
Brendan,
What’s so bad about Shanghai??? Where are you based?
Ken
Hi John,
Have you tried setting up a proof-reading system? For example, two native-Chinese speakers translate the document, the first does a first pass, then the second does a back-translation or checks the translation. By the time the work gets to a native English speaker, much of the easy mistakes get caught. You might even enlist a couple of ‘non-translator’ Cpod academic staff that want to improve their English as further down-the-line proof-readers before it gets to you. The pitch is that it will help their English!
I’ve noticed though that in Chinese universities students seem to do very little, if any, checking of other student’s work and re-writing. I remember in college sitting in a group of about six students where each week we’d take another person’s paper and provide feedback and errors. After going thru six iterations, let me tell you, the prose was perfect and I never wanted to see it again.
Is there such a thing as a native Chinese speaker who can write very good English, or who is willing to have their English checked and corrected? (OK, Jenny doesn’t count, she’s an Aussie in disguise.)
Ken – nah, I kid. I’ve been trying to whip up the China blogosphere into regional factions, with John heading up the Shanghai clique and Jeremy of Danwei leading the Beijing faction, but so far so luck. Have only been to Shanghai a couple of times, and I have to say that it seems much more livable than Beijing, where I’m based. So naturally, I’m against it.
Lantian,
We do have a multi-check system, but there’s so much English involved that it’s a lot of work for just one person (me) to check it all.
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