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Five more days for Man Asian Literary Prize submissions

Submissions for the 2010 Man Asian Literary prize will be accepted up until the end of the month! Remember, submissions must be of published English-language translations of books by Asian citizens, and must be submitted by publishers. If you're a translator (or Asian-citizen-author) with a novel you're proud of, bug your publisher now!

By Eric Abrahamsen, August 24, 8:07p.m.

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Mentoring scheme for literary translators hits the ground running

from Danny Hahn, Translators Association, London

For some time those of us at the (British) Translators Association have been discussing the possibility of setting up a mentoring scheme, as a way of allowing emerging translators to benefit from the experience of their more experienced colleagues. Mentoring does of course happen informally all the time – translators are a benign, helpful bunch on the whole, after all – but we wanted something more formal, something that the emerging translator could rely on for a set period of time, and which would also involve a modest fee to recognise the mentor’s time. And thanks to the generosity of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation we are delighted to have secured funds to make this happen at last.

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By Nicky Harman, August 17, 9:23a.m.

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Romancing the Office Chair

I planned to write a bit about whatever translation-related issues of interest cropped up in the midst of Notes of Civil Servant, and as it happened I barely got through the preface before I reached the first hard-to-crack nut. So here is Imponderable Number One: the word 官场 (guānchǎng), guan indicating government officials or officialdom, chang here meaning "field" or "arena". I suspect that this term is a derivation of 战场 (zhànchǎng), "battlefield", which gave birth elsewhere to 职场 (zhíchǎng), "professional arena" or, as we prosaic Westerners might call it, the employment market.

It's precisely the touch of martial romance inherent in the term that is significant. Your typical North American or Western European civil servant is anything but romantic. Dull of eye and stunted of fancy, clad in the sober weeds of duty, they do one thing and they do it, if not well, at least doggedly. They are cogs in the machine, possessing perhaps even less moral agency in their day-to-day decisions than your average voter/taxpayer.

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By Eric Abrahamsen, August 13, 6:55p.m.

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Yingelish

Here comes a rather impressive dispatch from the far reaches of linguistic brain-bendery: Johnathan Stalling's Yingelish, a poem written in Chinese characters, which can be read aloud (in Chinese) to create a completely different story in Chinese-sounding English. As if that weren't impressive enough, the whole thing was rendered last week as a "Sinophonic English Opera" at the University of Yunnan, where the text was sung, acted out, and accompanied by a dizzying array of musical instruments. Download the flyer for the event, or see a few pictures here (Chinese only).

By Eric Abrahamsen, August 2, 9:37p.m.

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Eric Abrahamsen to translate Gongwuyuan Biji/Notes of a civil servant

It's been a good year for Chinese to English translation, and it's getting better. Eric Abrahamsen is to translate Wang Xiaofang's well-known novel on official corruption in China, working title Notes of a civil servant. The publisher is Penguin and the book is due out in 2011. Eric needs no introduction, since he is the founder and driving force behind Paper Republic. Great news, Eric!

By Nicky Harman, July 28, 4:13a.m.

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Cha: Call for Submissions

Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (http://asiancha.com/) iis now accepting submissions for "The China Issue", an edition of the journal devoted exclusively to work from and about contemporary China. The issue, which will be published in June 2011, will feature poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, scholarly works and visual art exploring the modern Middle Kingdom. We are looking for submissions from a wide range of Chinese and international voices on the social, political and cultural forces which are shaping the country. If you have something interesting, opinionated or fresh to say about China today, we would like to hear from you. Please note that we can only accept submissions in English. More information here: http://asiancha.blogspot.com/2010/07/call-for-submissions-china-issue.html

By Eric Abrahamsen, July 17, 2:08p.m.

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University of Iowa: Life of Discovery

The University of Iowa's "Life of Discovery" program concluded recently: this was the second annual installation of a joint program between Iowa's International Writing Program and the China Writers Association, bringing American and Chinese writers together for a little road-trip bonding. Besides the official webpage above, you can peruse their blog, where the writers (Americans only?) posted photos and blogged their bewilderment. The event consisted of two parts: a week in Iowa last May, and a couple of weeks in China, mostly Kunming, which ended July 9.

This year's participants, on the Chinese side:

  1. Liu Zhenyun 刘震云
  2. Peng Xueming 彭学明
  3. Fan Jizu 范继祖
  4. He Xiaomei 和晓梅
  5. Lu Qin 禄琴
  6. Yang Guoqing 杨国庆
  7. Zhang Gencui 张根粹

Interestingly, nearly all the Chinese participants were ethnic minorities, mostly poets. The Americans:

  1. Christopher Merrill
  2. Vu Tran
  3. Matt Hart
  4. Kiki Petrosino
  5. Amanda Nadelberg
  6. Kyle Dargan

Great to see these kinds of events going on!

By Eric Abrahamsen, July 16, 4:23p.m.

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On two recently released novels by Chinese American authors

I was really excited when I saw the title Girl in Translation (published by Penguin), but I didn't know it was going to be a book of literal translation.

The author of Girl in Translation is Jean Kwok. The description on *Girl in Translation is as follows: "When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings."

But what becomes nagging after a while is then obvious - the author translates literally:

"The white disease" for leukemia," “small-hearted" for be careful and "release your heart" for don't worry. Asked about this in the Danwei interview, she said that the reason was this: “It took me ten years to write this novel and one of my goals was to develop a technique that would show English-speaking readers what it was like to be a native speaker of Chinese. I wanted to put the reader into the head and heart of a Chinese immigrant. English comes in garbled and incomprehensible, while the beauty of the Chinese language is easily understood.”

I wonder if when Chinese people say 小心, they really think of small hearts, or when they say 放心, they think of release. With no disrespect for the Kwok, these are just general questions that are interesting.

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By Alice Liu, July 14, 1:19a.m.

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Event: Chun Shu talks about her new book

Next Tuesday (June 29) Chun Shu will be giving a talk at the Trends Lounge in Beijing about her new book, Light Year American Dream, as part of the Trends Lounge's Cosmo Women's Reading Salon series.

Time: June 29 (Tuesday), 7-9pm Venue: Trends Lounge, 2F The Place (世贸天地), Beijing
Phone: 010 6587 1999

By Eric Abrahamsen, June 23, 10:14p.m.

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Julia Lovell on Lu Xun

"With the PRC now in its swaggering 60s, I would prescribe – to counter the excesses of Beijing bombast – a stiff dose of Lu Xun", Julia concludes in this June 12th 2010 article on the relevance of Lu Xun to contemporary China, in the (UK) Guardian newspaper.

By Nicky Harman, June 13, 7:32a.m.

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Thinking Chinese translation - useful new reference/teaching book

Thinking Chinese Translation is a practical and comprehensive course-book, intended for translation students and of interest to practising translators too.

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By Nicky Harman, June 10, 9:21a.m.

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2010 PEN Translation Prize Winners

The winners of PEN's annual translation prize have been announced. Among many worthy winners in many worthy languages, our own particular bias has been satisfied in the form of David Hull's translation of Waverings (presumably 动摇), a novel by Mao Dun. See their official announcement. Congrats to David Hull, a grad student at UCLA.

Nice to see attention paid to the old worthies!

By Eric Abrahamsen, June 2, 7:54p.m.

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Scatological humour in Zhu Wen and Han Dong

Pamela Hunt writes: Why are there so many modern Chinese novels in which, as Cindy Carter put it so nicely in an earlier post, ‘faeces play a starring role’? Any reader of contemporary Chinese fiction will tell you that you don’t have to look very far to find a joke about bodily functions. But at the same time humour is rarely discussed in academic writing on Chinese literature, let alone humour that centres around the toilet. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed a shame, which is why I decided to tackle the subject myself in a recent essay for the MA in Modern Chinese Literature at SOAS, University of London, focusing on the work of two authors much discussed on the pages of Paper Republic, Han Dong and Zhu Wen.

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By Nicky Harman, June 2, 10:31a.m.

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"Going Postal": In Chinese, please

From the June 1 New York Times:

BEIJING — A security guard apparently angered by a court-imposed divorce settlement shot and killed three people and wounded three others at a courthouse in Hunan Province before turning the weapon on himself, the state media reported.

...the assailant, Zhu Jun, 46, was the head of security at a local Postal Savings Bank branch and had access to a small arsenal.

Thus my question: How does one say, "He went postal" in Chinese?

By Bruce Humes, June 1, 8:17p.m.

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