A spectre is haunting Unicode

Unicode 正被幽灵萦绕

In 1978 Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry established the encoding that would later be known as JIS X 0208, which still serves as an important reference for all Japanese encodings.

1978 年，日本经济产业省确立了后来被称为 JIS X 0208 的编码，它至今仍是所有日语编码的重要参考。

However, after the JIS standard was released people noticed something strange - several of the added characters had no obvious sources, and nobody could tell what they meant or how they should be pronounced. Nobody was sure where they came from. These are what came to be known as the ghost characters (幽霊文字).

然而，JIS 标准发布后，人们注意到了一些奇怪的现象——新增的字符中有几个没有明显的来源，没人能说出它们的意思或读音。没人确定它们从何而来。这些字符后来被称为“幽灵字符”（幽霊文字）。

Be careful what you write.

小心你写下的东西。

For a long time the ghost characters remained an unexplained and mostly forgotten curiosity, but in 1997 an investigation was launched to discover where they had come from.

很长一段时间里，幽灵字符一直是一个无法解释且大多被遗忘的怪谈，但在 1997 年，一项调查启动，旨在发现它们的来源。

While all characters in the JIS standard were supposed to have a record of their sources, even when it existed it wasn’t very specific, typically just listing the document it was sourced from.

虽然 JIS 标准中的所有字符本应都有来源记录，但即使存在记录，也不够具体，通常只列出其来源文档。

You’d think that listing the source would make tracking down the origins of the characters easy, but it’s important to clarify what counts as a “source” - one of the more common sources for the ghost characters was the “Overview of National Administrative Districts” (国土行政区画総覧), a comprehensive list of place names in Japan.

你可能会认为列出来源会让追踪字符起源变得容易，但重要的是澄清什么才算作“来源”——幽灵字符更常见的来源之一是《国土行政区画总览》（国土行政区画総覧），这是一份日本地名的综合列表。

You might, as I initially did, imagine this to be a kind of atlas, an oversize book with at most a few hundred pages. It turns out the latest edition is a seven volume set with each volume having roughly nine hundred pages. Imagine tracking down a single character without a page reference.

你或许会像我最初那样，想象这是一本类似地图册的大开本书籍，最多几百页。结果发现最新版本是七卷本，每卷大约九百页。想象一下在没有页码参考的情况下追踪单个字符。

Despite the difficulty, the investigation into the ghost characters was successful in discovering their origins - mostly. By interviewing the catalogers involved in the creation of the standard, the investigators established that some characters were inadvertently invented as mistakes in the cataloging process.

尽管困难重重，对幽灵字符的调查还是成功发现了它们的起源——大部分如此。通过采访参与标准制定的编目人员，调查人员确定有些字符是在编目过程中无意中作为错误被创造出来的。

For example, 妛 was an error introduced while trying to record “山 over 女”. “山 over 女” occurs in the name of a particular place and was thus suitable for inclusion in the JIS standard, but because they couldn’t print it as one character yet, 山 and 女 were printed separately, cut out, and pasted onto a sheet of paper, and then copied.

例如，妛是在试图记录“山在女上”时引入的错误。“山在女上”出现在某个特定地名的名称中，因此适合纳入 JIS 标准，但由于当时无法将其作为一个字符打印，山和女被分开打印，剪下后贴在一张纸上，然后进行复印。

When reading the copy, the line where the two little pieces of paper met looked like a stroke and was added to the character by mistake. The original character (𡚴) was not added to JIS or Unicode until much later and doesn’t display on most sites for me.

在阅读复印件时，两张小纸片相接的线条看起来像是一笔，被错误地添加到了字符中。原始字符（𡚴）直到很久以后才被加入 JIS 或 Unicode，并且在我访问的大多数网站上无法显示。

The core ghost characters: 妛挧暃椦槞蟐袮閠駲墸壥彁

核心幽灵字符：妛挧暃椦槞蟐袮閠駲墸壥彁

In the end only one character had neither a clear source nor any historical precedent: 彁. The most likely explanation is that it was created as a misreading of the 彊 character, but no specific incident was uncovered.

最终，只有一个字符既没有明确的来源也没有任何历史先例：彁。最可能的解释是它是作为对彊字符的误读而被创造的，但没有发现具体的事件。

Following the general adoption of the JIS standards these characters all made their way into Unicode, which has its own separate set of ghost characters introduced during CJK unification.

随着 JIS 标准的普遍采用，这些字符都进入了 Unicode，而 Unicode 在 CJK 统一过程中也引入了自己的一套幽灵字符。

To sum up - in 1978 a series of small mistakes created some characters out of nothing. The errors went undiscovered just long enough to be set in stone, and now these ghosts are, at least in potential, a part of every computer on the planet, lurking in the dark corners of character tables. At this rate they’ll presumably be with humanity forever.

总而言之——1978 年，一系列小错误凭空创造了一些字符。这些错误未被发现的时间刚好足够被固化下来，现在这些幽灵至少潜在地成为了地球上每台计算机的一部分，潜伏在字符表的黑暗角落。照这个速度，它们大概将永远伴随人类。