The British Centre for Literary Translation is holding its Summer School 18-24 July 2010 and registration is now open. Bursaries are available for students translating from Chinese to English. Our resident author this year is Yan Geling, and I'll ...
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Foreign publishers considering attending the 2009 Beijing International Book Fair might want to know about the Special Publisher Program, aimed at publishers who want to attend the fair but are a little tight on funds. The application deadline for this program has been extended to the end of July, so if you're interested click here for more details and application instructions.
By Eric Abrahamsen, May 31, 5:29a.m.
There's a song that's been making its way around the Internet: Zhou Yunpeng's "Don't Ever Be a Chinese Child" (不要做中國人的孩子 by 周云蓬) - if the above link is blocked, try this. I've been working on a translation, but felt it was too depressing to post. Maybe it's time:
Don't Ever Be a Chinese Child
Don't be a child of Karamay
whose burns would scorch a mother's heart
Don't be a child of Salan Town
who finds no rest beneath dark waters
Don't be a child of Chengdu
who waits for mum's return
after her week-long binge
Chorus (children laughing)
Don't be a child of Henan
where AIDS cackles in the blood
Don't be a child of Shanxi
where mines turn dads
into baskets of coal
Chorus (laughter)
Don't be a child of Karamay
Don't be a child of Salan Town
Don't be a child of Chengdu
Don't be a child of Henan...
Don't ever be a Chinese child,
or the grown-ups will
eat you when they starve
At least in the wild,
mountain goats are fierce
enough to protect their kids
Don't ever be a Chinese child,
because mommy and
daddy are cowards
When the theatre caught fire,
they steeled their hearts
and let the cadres exit first.
不要做中國人的孩子
周云蓬
不要做克拉瑪依的孩子，
火燒痛皮膚讓親娘心焦
不要做沙蘭鎮的孩子，
水底下漆黑他睡不著
不要做成都人的孩子，
吸毒的媽媽七天七夜不回家
不要做河南人的孩子，
愛滋病在血液裡哈哈的笑
不要做山西人的孩子，
爸爸變成了一筐煤，
你別再想見到他
不要做中國人的孩子，
餓極了他們會把你吃掉
還不如曠野中的老山羊，
為保護小羊而目露兇光
不要做中國人的孩子，
爸爸媽媽都是些怯懦的人
為證明他們的鐵石心腸，
死到臨頭讓領導先走
Zhou Yunpeng is a blind folk musician - singer, songwriter and guitarist - now living in Beijing.
By Cindy M. Carter, May 29, 2:25p.m.
From Sunday 19 - Saturday 25 July 2009, the British Centre for literary Translation (BCLT) at the university holds its tenth annual International Literary Translation Summer School, which will for the first time offer an intensive workshop in translation from Chinese to English. This hands-on networking and training opportunity takes place at UEA from July 19-25 and will involve author Xinran (China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation, Miss Chopsticks, The Good Women of China) and her translator Nicky Harman.
Also, as part of the Worlds Literary Festival, to be held at various venues in Norfolk from June 20-25, BCLT is also hosting author and filmmaker Zhu Wen (I Love Dollars, released by Penguin in 2008) and his translator Julia Lovell. The festival, entitled Worlds in Translation, is a celebration of international writing and includes various readings, workshops and panel discussions that will be open to the public.
By Nicky Harman, May 27, 11:04a.m.
In a comment to my post on May 4th & Chinese Literature in Translation, talking about disparities in how different genres of Chinese literature are represented in English, I wrote:
find me one English translation of a single-author collection of poems by a poet living in China.
I was thinking that someone might mention books by Taiwanese poets Shang Qin 商禽 or Hsia Yu 夏宇, both translated by Steven Bradbury (and published by Zephyr Press, a great small press with a large repertoire of translations from the Chinese). And I knew of other works in progress of mainland authors, still awaiting publication.
But I didn't expect that another answer would come from Tibet. This morning I opened my mailbox and found a package sent by A. E. Clark, with a book of his translations of Tibetan-Chinese poet Woeser, Tibet's True Heart, published by Ragged Banner Press.
Woeser writes in Chinese and now lives in Beijing, but her writing is infused with the complexities of her Tibetan cultural background. I haven't yet read Tibet's True Heart, but I look forward to reading Andrew Clark's English versions of her poems.
Sample poems and more recent writing of Woeser can be found on the Ragged Banner website.
By Lucas Klein, May 18, 10:33p.m.
The Drawbridge welcomes submissions, translated from Chinese, for its upcoming issues, Silence and First Love.
The Drawbridge is an independent literary and cultural quarterly based in London, with a worldwide outlook. You can get a sense of its scope at its website. Each issue casts a broad net around a specific theme. The Silence issue publishes in August, with a text deadline of 26 June. The deadline for FirstLove (November) is 11 September. Short fiction and non-fiction equally welcome. Target length 1,200-2,000 words.
The Drawbridge is unable to offer a fee for contributions,but any published work reaches up to 15,000 intellectually curious and internationally aware readers, including many UK and international publishers and agents.
Contact the commissioning editor, Mark Reynolds: mark@thedrawbridge.org.uk
By Nicky Harman, May 15, 9:49a.m.
St. Jerome may be the patron saint of all translators, but for those of us working in Chinese literature, David Hawkes is something like a living buddha. His work on the first 80 chapters of The Story of the Stone would be enough, but there's also Songs of the South (translations of Qu Yuan and other 楚辞), and A Little Primer of Tu Fu, an authoritative introduction to the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu.
Hawkes, now long retired, lives in Oxford, and when we were in London recently, we made a special trip up to the original college town (absolutely beautiful) to pay him a visit. He and his wife graciously received us, and fed us, and we had two short hours to talk about China and Chinese literature. We exchanged reminiscences about Beijing – apparently we have lived in spots only a few blocks apart – which I later had to re-evaluate when I realized that the last time he was in Beijing it still had its city walls, and he arrived there by steamship.
By Eric Abrahamsen, May 11, 4:32a.m.
The following is a translation of this article from Caijing magazine, entitled 译书有禁区 (Book Translation's 'Forbidden Area' in China).
Here's a comment left by a netizen on this writer's blog post, 'Huiyuan is a Foreign Enterprise':
"Is there a Chinese language version of Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics? Can you buy it on the Mainland?"
My blog post described a few ideas from a new book by Professor Huang Yasheng, at MIT's Sloan School of Management (Yasheng Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State, Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Professor Huang is an overseas-Chinese scholar, and his book is written in English. But I must agree with the commenter's point: there's little chance that a Chinese translation of the book could be published.
In fact, very few books published abroad by overseas-Chinese scholars are translated into Chinese, particularly when the books are written on the subject of China. Some scholarly works are translated into Chinese, but with some of the contents altered. Of course, works by non overseas-Chinese also meet with the same treatment.
I'll give a few other examples of which I'm aware:
In 2005, Hu Danian, professor of history at the City University of New York, published China and Albert Einstein through the Harvard University Press (China and Albert Einstein: The Reception of the Physicist and His Theory in China, 1917-1979, Harvard University Press, 2005). One year later, Professor Hu translated his own book into Chinese as 爱因斯坦在中国 (1917－1979), adding quite a bit of newly-discovered historical material, and it was published by the Shanghai Science and Technology Education Publishing House, part of the Shanghai Century Publishing Group.
The part of the book describing criticisms of Einstein and his theories during the Cultural Revolution was deleted, and the names of several famous people, including famous scientists, were removed. Interested readers can compare the published versions with some chapters available online:
http://www.tecn.cn/data/18249.html
The Chinese Century: The Rising Chinese Economy and Its Impact on the Global Economy, the Balance of Power, and Your Job (Wharton School Publishing, 2004), by Professor Oded Shenkar, Ohio State University's School of Business, was published in Chinese in 2005 by the People's University Press. But the chapters on intellectual property rights were deleted altogether, because the translator did not agree with the writer's point of view.
By Eric Abrahamsen, May 11, 3:03a.m.
To commemorate the 90th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, the South China Morning Post runs an article investigating
As a tribute to the May Fourth Movement goes, it's no last-year's Sunday New York Times Book Review, featuring four new translations of Chinese literature, but then again, May Fourth doesn't fall on a Sunday this year.
What the South China Morning Post article does raise, implicitly at least, is the question of World Literature and its relationship to Chinese literature.
By Lucas Klein, May 4, 5:04p.m.
20,000 RMB for 34,000 WORDS (but lots of repetition, conversations mostly). Subject: three smart, funny modern women in contemporary Beijing. If you can finish the first draft by MAY 11th, there's a 5,000 RMB bonus.
Payment upon completion of final subs. Minimal interface with director required – maybe none at all.
Chris Barden is project managing this and will proof the final titles.
Contact directly: chris@hutongrobot.com
13911163683
By Eric Abrahamsen, May 3, 7:52a.m.
The last literary event we organised took place in Edinburgh, Scotland on 27 April 2009. Tommy McClellan invited Han Dong to give a lecture on contemporary Chinese literature at Edinburgh University. (Nicky Harman translated it, and we read it in tandem, a paragraph in Chinese and a paragraph in English.) After questions, there was a translators' discussion, including Esther Tyldesley and Eric Abrahamsen. Click here for the lecture in Chinese and here for the English translation.
By Nicky Harman, May 2, 11:10a.m.
New Comments
on Google Translator: Making the World a More Baffling Place?
To be fair, Google has gotten noticeably better for Chinese over the past few years. The big problems seem to be that their parallel text corpus is just nowhere near the size of corpi for European languages, and that since ...
posted by Brendan
Just so I don't forget this anecdote: On the ten-hour train ride from Wuhan back to Beijing two days ago, I passed a gas station with the following sign:
加油站 onlinetranslation 加油站 onlinetranslation
posted by Canaan Morse
Several things about Google Translate.
I didn't know about until 6 months ago. For someone who often depends on translation for a living, that is pathetic.
Now that I do, I must say that like those examples cited above ...
posted by Bruce
...That being the case, I would expect that something like Google Translate, which seems rather Euro-centric and handles translation between European languages fairly well, will soon be much better equipped to handle modern Chinese than it is right now. I ...
posted by Bruce
Google translate will soon spell the end of translation memory such as Trados, which is great because it's a horrible, cumbersome piece of software that is artificially made difficult so that translators can claim Trados expertise.
I don't ...
posted by ff
on Quotes: Highlighting "local color" or "Chinglish"?
@ #12 Martin
That article is interesting, but I feel like it doesn't apply the same way to translations. Usually, you would want the translation to sound as idiomatic as the original.
posted by GAC