Today my preferred airline has an English site for booking tickets originating in Shanghai. I can go online and choose endless options for dates, upgrades, and even pick my seat. It is a treat to be able to book my own ticket as my airline’s frequent flyer program has so many variations, that to get credit or upgrades properly, one must be ready to answer about a hundred questions.

For example, in my frequent flyer program, some economy seats cannot be upgraded to business class no matter how many miles you have. But for $300 more, I can buy a different class of economy tickets that can be upgraded. Usually I’m happy to pay the extra money so that I can stretch out in business class and spend my 12 hours channel surfing on my private TV screen. The catch with my airline is, you have to first buy your ticket, and then register for upgrading. So you have to see if there are any business class seats available for the flight you want before you book, and if yes, buy the more expensive economy class ticket.

If you’re getting a headache tying to follow what I just explained, and you are a native English speaker, think of my poor assistant. As someone who can count on one hand the number of times she’s taken a flight, and who has never traveled internationally, it was a tricky business to understand. But understand she did.

Gladly I sent her to the phones to orchestrate, coordinate, and cajoled the airline into reserving the precious upgradeable ($300 more) economy class ticket. A few days later, she put the paid ticket in my hand. Now all I had to do was to call for the upgrade.

My happy phone call to the airline turned into confused frustration as the ticket agent broke the new: I could not get an upgrade because the ticket was booked under a different name.

In looking closer, I realized that while my name was on the ticket, in was in a different order. The booking agent had taken my first name to be my last, as the order would be if my name were in Chinese. To compound the error, my assistant had booked the more expensive ticket but without giving the airline my frequent flyer number. Had she done so, the computer would have spit out the name discrepancy.

In order to correct this mistake, I would have to cancel my ticket, and book a new one under my correct name. By now it was days later, and the flight sold out with a waiting list a mile long. Getting a seat on this flight again, in the five minutes it would take to book a new ticket, was not guaranteed. There was nothing to do but to travel with the existing ticket – in economy.

My trusty assistant had made a very small mistake, but it costs me $300 more in fare, no upgrade to business class, and worst, not getting the credit for the 16,000 mile flight. But it was a simple mistake, and nothing to get too upset over, except my assistant didn’t see it that way.

She did not admit to her mistake. You didn’t give me all the information, she said simply. But I gave you my frequent flyer number, I said. The booking agent didn’t put it in the computer, she then said. So you did give my number to the agent? It must be the airline’s fault, and so it went.

Her pretty wide eyes suddenly looked more mocking than charming. And I wondered how can I impress on her the need to do this correctly next time – if she did not believed she made a mistake? Later I was to ask my good friend, a Shanghainese by birth who lived most of her adult life in the west.

It turns out that my assistant might not be unaware of her mistake. It might be that there just simply isn’t a translation for "mistake." In Chinese, errors are expressed as cuo, which is more similar to wrong than to mistake: I heard wrongly (ting cuo); I said it wrongly (suo cuo), did it wrongly (zuo cuo), and so on.

However, the word wrong, cuo, gained added notoriety as being the opposite of "correct" during the Cultural Revolution. If one did not followed the "correct line," or having "correct thoughts," then one must be wrong, or committing a cuo wu. Something that could land you in jail.

Not surprisingly then, that when "mistake" is translated as cuo, no matter how innocent it sounds in English, it will not be lightly admitted to in Chinese. For the translation of this one word can apply equally in talking about dialing a wrong number to committing a crime. There is no difference, in Chinese meaning, between, "I’m sorry, I made a mistake, I booked you a table for 4 instead of a table for 5," to "I confessed to my wrong doing, I should not have written an inflammable pamphlet calling for the overthrow of the government."

No matter how much you explain that it’s okay to say you made a mistake and that we all mistake, it is never okay. Admitting to it is akin to being … well, wrong. (That brings up another interesting question: if one cannot admit to making a mistake, how can one learn from a mistake? But that is for another column.)

So when your assistant sends your thank you letter to the client who hasn’t paid in 6 months, and your collection threat to the best client of the firm, don’t bother telling her she made a mistake. Save yourself some frustration knowing that what’s lost in translation is her apology – even when she shrugs her shoulders and asks, "So you want me to send them again?"