Martian language (), sometimes also called brain-disabled characters (), is the nickname of unconventional representation of Chinese characters online. "Martian" describes that which seems strange to local culture. The term was popularised by a line from the 2001 Hong Kong comedy Shaolin Soccer, in which Sing (Stephen Chow) tells Mui (Zhao Wei): "Go back to Mars. The Earth is so dangerous." In the 2006 General Scholastic Ability Test of Taiwan, students were asked to interpret symbols and phrases written in "Martian language" based on contexts written in standard language. Controversies which followed forced the testing center to abandon the practice in future exams. In 2007, Martian language began to catch on in mainland China. The first adopters of Martian language mainly consisted of Post-90s netizens. They use it in their nicknames, short messages, and chat rooms in order to demonstrate personality differences. Later, they found that their teachers and parents could hardly figure out their new language, which quickly became their secret code to communicate with each other. Chinese online bloggers followed up the trend to use Martian language, because they found that their blog posts written in the new language can easily pass Internet censorship engines, which are currently based on text-matching techniques. The Martian language became so popular in cyberspace that software were created to translate between Chinese and Martian language. General aspects The Martian language is written from Chinese by means of various substitution methods. Just like in l33t, where the letter "e" is replaced by the number "3", in Martian, standard Chinese characters are replaced with nonstandard ones, or foreign scripts. Each Chinese character may be replaced with: A character that is a (quasi-)homophone A character that looks similar, such as one with a shared radical A character with the same or similar meaning The character used for substitution can include not only Chinese characters, but also Latin script, Cyrillic, hiragana, bopomofo, katakana, the IPA, other unicode symbols, SMS language, etc. For example, the 星 in 火星文 huoxingwen (星 is literally "star"; 火星 is "Planet Mars") can be replaced by "☆", a Unicode symbol that visually represents an actual star. 的 is commonly replaced with の, as it has the same intended meaning in Japanese. 火 can become 吙 just by adding a 口 radical, which alters very little in terms of sound and visually maintains the 火 image, even though this changes the meaning. In