Morat Extra Story

Some publications have mentioned the morat error, misreading. Photo: HXH

"In the dark, in the dark"

“Don’t be a fool! I know how daily newspapers are, they rush to print any news that can be published quickly to compete for publication, resulting in a mess of words!” Mr. Tu once scolded his daughter Nguyen Thi Lan like that in the novel “Tat lua long” by writer Nguyen Cong Hoan. At that time, father and daughter were discussing the results of Vu Khac Diep’s Diploma exam, or Ba Chung, after 4 years of studying French-Vietnamese Elementary School.

The story was then told to the part where Mr. Tu waited for Diep to come to report the exam news. Diep's father and Mr. Tu were friends. Seeing Diep and Lan playing together since childhood, the two fathers promised to marry their daughters to each other later... That afternoon, the postman brought the daily newspaper to Mr. Tu's house before Diep.

The story continues, quoting Mr. Tu:

- Diep's score was very high. He ranked eighth.

Lan was still indifferent as before, answering:

- That's the order of the newspaper A, B, C. If the first letter of the name is D, people will put it on top, not high or low! (…)

- But, my child, here they misprinted, the letter p is typed with the letter n, so the name is Vu Khac Dien.

Seeing something strange, Lan ran behind her father, looked at the newspaper and said:

- Sir, that's Vu Khac Dien.

- Don't be smarter than a louse!

(Extinguishing the Fire of the Heart, Literature Publishing House 2017, page 21).

Of course, after the scolding sentence "Don't be smarter than a louse!", Mr. Tu continued to say a series of words, as quoted.

Luckily, the newspaper that day printed correctly, the letter n was not p, meaning Dien passed the exam, not Diep. And of course, unfortunately, because he failed the exam, Diep's life took a different turn.

Diep went to stay at the house of Mr. Phu Tran, an old classmate of Diep's father, to retake the exam for the second time and was promised help in finding a job. But one drunken night, Diep was tricked into sleeping in the same room with Mr. Phu Tran's daughter Thuy Lieu (who was pregnant at that time with a soldier in a green uniform stationed near the house).

When Diep was forced to marry Thuy Lieu, Lan cut her hair and became a nun. Lan and Diep's love story reached a dead end, made even more tragic by the vọng cổ verses.

Stormy and green shoots

Morat errors are an eternal story of journalism. Ignoring the suspicion of “printing in a hurry to finish” during the Lan and Diep era, technical errors are always carefully corrected by editorial offices. The proofreading stage is handled by “sober-minded people”. With online channels, technical errors are more likely to occur, so there is an additional post-check team.

Professor Nguyen Duc Dan listed many cases of morat errors in the book "From wrong sentences to good sentences" (Tre Publishing House, 2013).

There are many humorous mistakes. An issue published on September 20, 1993 wrote that priest Alexandre de Rhodes “joined the Party in 1620”. In fact, the correct spelling should be “entered Dang Trong in 1620”. Another newspaper mistakenly arranged a foreign word, “l'amiral” (admiral) as “l'animal” (animal), causing the editor to be disciplined.

Poet Khuong Huu Dung went to the printing house to tell the typesetter not to mistakenly arrange the word “noi” (tilde accent) as “noi” (question mark) in the last verse of the poem “Len Con Son” (or “Con Son”): “Ma thay vong than cam boi bao dong”. However, when reprinting later, there was still a mistake in arranging “noi bao dong” (noun) as “noi bao dong” (verb)...

Coincidentally, the poet Khuong Huu Dung himself also made a typo when he was an editor at the Literature Publishing House. Around the beginning of the 60s of the 20th century, Xuan Quynh sent to the Literature Publishing House a manuscript of poetry titled “Troi biec”, but the poetess misspelled it (tr/ch error) as “Choi biec”. The two editors of the publishing house at that time, Khuong Huu Dung and Yen Lan (both from the South), read “choi” as “choi”, and finally the literary world published the poetry collection “Choi biec”. The interesting mistake made Professor Nguyen Duc Dan classify this “anecdotes of ch/tr, oi/oi” in the sub-category: from a less good sentence to a very good sentence.

“Force” on a stack of paper and the risks of chatbots

In the history of printing and journalism, there are situations where no matter how careful you are, you cannot guarantee accuracy, such as the case of translating Jin Yong's martial arts novels.

The late musician and journalist Vu Duc Sao Bien, when writing about translator Han Giang Nhan in his essay “Kim Dung in My Life”, told the story of translation and printing at that time. It is said that every morning, translator Han Giang Nhan would sit upstairs and open the pages of Hong Kong newspapers that published Kim Dung’s martial arts stories in the feuilleton style (novels published in serial newspapers). He would read through them, then read a Chinese sentence and immediately translate a Vietnamese sentence. His secretary would take care of the notes.

When the translation is finished, the secretary brings it down to the ground floor and distributes it to the correspondents of the daily newspapers who are waiting. The “risk” of making mistakes or misspelled words also arises from here.

Usually, the secretary arranges about 12 thin sheets of pelure and 11 sheets of carbon paper, listens to the oral translation, and then writes it down with a ballpoint pen. The secretary cannot type with such a thick stack of paper. He presses hard on the pen tip so that the “force” can print through 11-12 thin sheets of pelure. It is a matter of luck for those waiting to receive the translation. “Those who are lucky enough to receive the top copy, the words are still clearly readable; those who are slow to take the bottom copy, have to guess the meaning from the words. Therefore, even with the same translation, sometimes one newspaper is different from another” (Ibid., Tre Publishing House 2015, page 438).

I typed in the phrase “common errors in journalism”, and in just 0.28 seconds, Google search engine gave about 146 million results. To see, this topic is quite “rich” and… endless. And it will be “endless” even when artificial intelligence (AI) joins the writing game. In early June 2025, an international news agency mentioned concerns about the reliability of popular chatbot tools such as Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini. Many people realized that when searching and verifying information, sometimes chatbot responses contain false, fabricated information…

Then it still has to be up to people to verify themselves, or ask for help from "sober people".

Source: https://baoquangnam.vn/morat-ngoai-truyen-3157125.html