The representation of gender in foreign language teaching has attracted the attention of many scholars and has been investigated in different parts of the world. Due to its potential for deep impact on pupils, it is a matter of great concern. Discrimination against a gender group in coursebooks can lead to harmful impacts on pupils' development as well as on their future academic and career (Lee, 2018). The lack of representation of females in language coursebooks may seriously harm their ability to understand the target language as well as its culture (Rifkin, 1998).

English vocabulary has expanded over centuries by ‘borrowing’ lexical items from other languages (Katamba, 2005; Durkin, 2014). Compared with European languages, non-European languages are never major sources of word borrowing in English, with Chinese staying even more peripheral. Scholars have recorded no more than a few hundred English words of Chinese origin. This, however, does not make it easier to study the etymology and semantics of Chinese loanwords. The complication arises from the various source dialects from which Chinese words were borrowed (Mandarin, Cantonese, Amoy, Hokkien, etc.) and also from transcription processes, in which Chinese logograms are ‘romanised’ into phonetic representations so as to be readable for English speakers. It is a procedure easily affected by the transcribers' own cognition and the transcription systems employed, and the arbitrariness of the above variables contributes much to the fact that the orthography of Chinese loanwords, especially those entering the English language early, are prone to changes. This article aims to shed some light on how the ways of transcription may affect the spelling of Chinese loanwords.

One of the most important components of a country's language policy is its planning on foreign languages and its decisions regarding which foreign language(s) to choose and teach to its people in the nation's school system (Cenoz & Gorter, 2012). The government generally makes a selection among the candidate languages on the basis of the languages' perceived economic and socio-political value inside and outside the country. However, the socio-economic power and prestige of languages are variable and bound to change over time (Wright, 2004). For this reason, changes are almost always observed in any country's foreign language policy.

Medium of instruction (‘MOI’) issues have long been identified as the most important decisions in the internationalization of higher education (HE) (Hamid, Nguyen & Baldauf, 2013). The adoption of internationally influential languages as MOIs may attract international students who aspire to undertake higher education in these languages, which in turn helps to sustain the status of these languages as internationally influential. Among all these languages, English is certainly the most powerful academic lingua franca and boosted by its use as MOI in globally leading universities worldwide. However, the elevated position of English in international higher education seems not without competition, as many governments in non-English-speaking countries have made efforts to internationalize their higher education by providing parallel higher learning programs both with English and with their native language (usually the official language) for international students. For instance, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), in which it first promoted higher education in the medium of German and later expanded to the medium of English in the 2000s, plays a critical role in attracting and recruiting international students to study in German universities (e.g. Erling & Hilgendorf, 2006).

On 22 May 2013, programmer Steve Wilhite was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 17th Annual Webby Awards in New York. Wilhite received this award chiefly in recognition of the Graphics Interchange Format, popularly known as GIF, which was developed by him and his team at CompuServe in the 1980s. This format is best known for the short animations that it enables, which have become a staple of the Internet, especially since platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp started providing support for the format in their messaging services.

In a well-known and much discussed article, the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote as follows (Russell, 1952):