Jia Pingwa's novel Qin Qiang (The Writers Publishing House, 2005) won last year's Mao Dun Literary Prize and is another masterpiece by the prolific author, whose works are still mostly unknown and untranslated. What is there to appeal to translators and potential readers in the book? When are we going to see it in translation?
From the first half of the book, romance, rats and local politics in rural Shaanxi:
I still remember the rat that crawled out of the sewer. I raised him as a pet. He'd climb on the ceiling rafters and dance for me. After he was tired of dancing, he'd look down at me. His eyes were all pupil, dark black pupils that glinted with mischief. Cats knew not to venture close to my home. After my father died and I was left alone, nobody knew how I spent my time. But the rat knew. Each morning, I'd wake up and place three sticks of incense in front of the portrait of my deceased father, then sit down to write in my diary. In Qingfeng Jie, I was probably the only one who was writing away at a diary. From the incense burner, a ribbon of dark smoke slowly curled upward. It lengthened, reaching up to the rafters, where the rat watched me write. The rat thought it was a string and he leapt out, hoping to slide down it, to the table. Pow, he crashed down into the incense burner.
I've heard people say that rats are smart but they can be pretty dumb, too. This rat was rather fond of me, actually. But one of the reasons he stuck around for so long was because my house always had something to eat. I heard that last year when Mao Dan from Dong Jie got sick, he had to sell everything to pay the doctor bills. Every rodent that had previously made a home in his house escaped as soon as the food was gone. What I wanted to say is: this rat was civilized. He even chewed up the pages in my diary, the ones about Bai Xue. I looked at him in wonder, You know that I miss Bai Xue? Rat, if you can understand me, run to Bai Xue and tell her how I feel. He immediately took off to Xia Tianzhi's home and Bai Xue's bedroom. The rat climbed up and down the mosquito netting that was wrapped around her bed. Bai Xue looked up, "A little thief, eh?" She used an empty makeup box to trap the rat inside. The box still had a bit of foundation powder inside. With the powder spread over his fur, the rat pitifully squeaked, "Yin Sheng misses you! Yin Sheng misses you!" Bai Xue didn't understand what my rat trying to tell her.
After a while, the rat wandered into the main room of the house, where he found something else to chew on: one of Xia Tianzhi's scrolls of calligraphy. The one that my rat chose to chew had been scrawled by the director of the county's cultural research insitute. When Xia Tianzhi discovered the holes in the scroll, he shut up the windows and the doors and trapped my rat inside the room. He tossed the rat to the mute to look after. The mute carried the rat outside, doused the tiny body with kerosene, set it on fire and tossed it to run in the big courtyard in front of the theatre. The rat immediately burrowed into a heap of wheat straw. The straw immediately caught on fire.
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By Dylan Levi King, February 19, 10:30p.m.
(I know, I know, but someone had to post this at some point. Figure it might as well be me.)
Author Eveline Chao and illustrator Chris Murphy serve up some naughty, naughty Mandarin in Niubi: The Real Chinese You Were Never Taught in School. 160 pages of handy up-to-date profanity and text that includes Chinese characters, pinyin, tonal marks, pronunciation guides and dubious etymologies. Fun for all ages.
ChinaSmack has good scans of text and illustrations from the book, and spirited Chinese and English commentary from readers.
Here's the Amazon link, and a link to an old Paper Republic discussion thread in which we hashed and mashed "The Unspeakable Bi".
By Cindy M. Carter, January 30, 10:32a.m.
A recent review from the NYT Sunday Book Review begins like so:
Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s wonderfully stylized new novel, “Running Away,” begins with a question: “Would it ever end with Marie?” That’s only fitting for a book that leaves so much unanswered — we never learn the narrator’s name or occupation or, indeed, why his relationship with Marie, his Parisian girlfriend, is tanking. Those aren’t the only riddles, either. From the outset, the narrator fails to divulge why Marie has asked him to deliver $25,000 to a Shanghai associate, Zhang Xiangzhi.
Now I may be afflicted with some occupational disease here, but to me the only thing that stands out in that paragraph is the fact that an author with a French name, writing an English-language thriller, has not only chosen to set part of his international storyline in China, but has given a major character a Chinese name containing two "zh"s and the dreaded "x".
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By Eric Abrahamsen, January 3, 5:48a.m.
Julia Lovell very kindly consented to give us the following interview, on the occasion of the Penguin Classics' publication of her translation of the complete fiction of Lu Xun.
Edit: Great minds think alike, or at least ask their questions of the same folk – Danwei has also posted an interview with Julia.
Lu Xun occupies a transitionary literary period between the classical writing of imperial China and what we consider modern Chinese today. How did you go about choosing an appropriate voice and register in English? What were some of the resources you turned to?
I suppose that when I started I was trying to recreate Lu Xun's own frame of reference. As is well known, he was a voracious reader of foreign literature. He once advised young writers to "read no Chinese books. Or as few as you can. But read more foreign books"; he even advocated something called "hard translation" that imported foreign syntax into the Chinese language through translation. So I thought that an obvious place to start might be some of the (particularly Eastern European) writers that he was keen on, and whose impact on his writing some scholars have studied: Gogol's "Diary of a Madman", for example. My own academic background is also very much in May-Fourth period writing - so I found it helpful to draw on knowledge of that era and of its ideas about the literature it was trying to create. A big part of the May Fourth vision of a new, modern literature was that it should intervene in life, that it should have an edge of political urgency to it - and that's strongly there in a lot of Lu Xun's fiction and essays.
But finally, and at the risk of sounding lazy, I think that Lu Xun does a lot of a translator's work for him/her. There's a tightly controlled fury bound up in his best, most powerful stories (I'm thinking particularly of pieces such as "Medicine", "Tomorrow", "Kong Yiji") that simply asks to be recreated in the target language. (Though I'm not saying I've succeeded at that.)
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By Eric Abrahamsen, November 10, 11a.m.
Shanghai-based blogger chinaSMACK has compiled a bilingual glossary of Chinese Internet/blogging/BBS terms. Useful for beginning/intermediate students of Chinese and Luddite old China hands alike, the glossary entries include the Chinese character(s) being discussed, tonal notation and well-written English explanations. Particulary fascinating are the entries explaining how Internet-based cultural memes morph over time (see the entries on 很傻，很天真 and 很黄,很暴力, for example). Thanks to Danwei for the link that led me to the chinaSMACK site.
By Cindy M. Carter, March 19, 6:52a.m.
…with nine members of the extended family and only one child, five-year-old Zhang Xinyu, who naturally becomes the center of attention. Sing us a song, Zhang Xinyu! Come give your auntie a hug, Zhang Xinyu. Zhang Xinyu, what do you call everyone here? The poor child has to go around the table and recite everyone's kinship to him: What's so-and-so's name, and what do you call him/her (你管他叫什么)? 老姨姥 (maternal grandmother's youngest sister)… 老舅姥爷 (maternal grandmother's youngest brother)… I'm slumped in my chair, worried I'll be tested next – after four years I know the names of almost no one in my wife's family (no one ever uses them!), and still occasionally forget which is aunt number two and which is aunt number three. I call according to my wife's position in the family, which makes things easier, but still I could never compare to the five-year-old Zhang Xinyu. He goes around the table, acing each one except for my mother-in-law, whom he calls 老舅妈 (mother's youngest brother's wife), instead of 老舅姥姥 (maternal grandmother's youngest brother's wife) – he's heard his mother call her that, and gotten his generations wrong. He comes around to me: What's his name? "Eric." What's his Chinese name? "陶建." What do you call him? "小姨父 (mother's female cousin's husband)." And what else do you call him? "美国大个子 (the big American)." Well done, Zhang Xinyu…
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By Eric Abrahamsen, February 23, 10:39p.m.
The following is a translation of this blog post, which came down the feed reader a day or so ago.
Soon after President Hu, at a very formal meeting, said the words "do not waver, do not slacken, do not mess around" (不动摇不懈怠不折腾), this phrase started to get popular. It was a bit of a shocker to hear something so slangy as "mess around" (折腾, zhéteng) come out of the mouth of a solemn, venerable personage like the General Secretary, and soon everyone was saying it.
But then some official media with nothing better to do started writing reports ("Translating 'Zheteng' from Hu Jintao's Report Stumps International Media") about how the proper English translation of 'zheteng' was "stumping language mavens in both the domestic and foreign media".
They underestimate us! A little phrase like this doesn't need a language maven to figure out, it's a piece of cake. According to the rule of 'crude for crude, elegant for elegant', I can think of a few translations: "no fooling around", "no messing around" or, if you want to get crude, "no fxxcking around" (these are all verb phrases). The translators aren't translating it, and everyone's talking around it, simply to keep from embarrassing President Hu. They're keeping it as "bu zheteng" because they have no other choice.
What's hilarious is that some retards in the Chinese media have written puff pieces saying that the Chinese 'bu zheteng' might even become a catchphrase in English. They shouldn't get their hopes up; the answer would be "No thanks. We've got plenty of words of our own, quit messing with our language." The way I see it, compared to 'bu zhengteng', some other suggestions from netizens' like 'not to huqiunong' (the Shaanxi version) or 'don't xiaqiunao' (Shandong version) have a better chance of making it into English.
Anyway, I suspect Hu Jintao was straying from the script when he said this, it doesn't sound like the sort of a thing a scriptwriter would come up with. Now everyone's elated that a Party boss could talk this way, they though they were off the hook as well. But in olden times they used to say you have to both listen to a man's words and observe his actions – I for one remain deeply skeptical. If a political party that makes a rule of "messing around" were to suddenly straighten up and fly right, they'd have no clue where to even start. Besides, before long they're going to roll out another movement, either "compulsory" or "optional"; they may say they're not "messing around", but it sure looks like it to me.
By Eric Abrahamsen, January 7, 8:13a.m.
According to Yu Hua, a professor of Chinese once ran his book 许三观卖血记 (translated as Chronicle of a Blood Merchant) through the data cruncher, and calculated the number of different characters Yu Hua had used in writing the book. The grand total was 486. Is that even possible?
Update: I asked Yu Hua for more details, he went digging, and it turns out this was quite wrong. The actual numbers are 1,909 characters for Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, and 1,907 characters in To Live. Far more than 486 characters; still far, far less than you'd expect for two of the more influential novels of the past couple decades.
By Eric Abrahamsen, December 22, 7:01p.m.
Howard Goldblatt has graciously allowed us to publish this essay of his on the openings of Chinese novels.
In the Beginning
"Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife."
How could anyone not want to keep reading, at least for a while, with an opening line like that?
Or:
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, and then again, as a teenage boy."
Or, finally:
"'Sons of bitches.' Lituma felt the vomit rising in his throat. 'Kid, they really did a job on you.'"
From Melville to Tolstoy and beyond, all the way to Ha Jin, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Mario Vargas Llosa, novelists in the West have assumed that, like a flashy cover, an arresting opening line can go a long way toward starting those pages turning.
When he wrote…
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."
…Nabakov knew he'd get our attention.
We don't, however, see many opening sentences of that nature in novels written in Chinese. After more than thirty years of translating Chinese novels into English, I cannot readily call to mind any I've worked on that provide a riveting, provocative, even outlandish opening. That's not to say they don't exist, or that the rules aren't changing, as cultural globalization gains momentum; it's just that a different, and equally valid, narrative strategy, a more tradition-bound beginning has been the norm in recent decades. I've often wondered what that says about the contemporary Chinese novel. Beyond that, how do expectations and standards of enjoyment or acceptance between Chinese and Western readers of fiction differ?
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By Eric Abrahamsen, November 10, 2:32p.m.
After what has felt like a long, long month of translating crap, I snuck over to a non-work-related short story this evening and chewed on the first paragraph. It's called 玻璃酿 — which might conceivably mean 'Glass Fermentation', or could have a particular meaning I'm unaware of — and it's something Zhao Song at the Heilan website recommended to me; you can read the original here.
The first sentence is pretty standard short-story-ese, but it presents greater challenges to translation than simply locating a dictionary with the word "open-cut coal seam" in it, and that alone is cause for celebration:
午后三点的光线延长了松针的阴影。
Roughly: the light of three in the afternoon lengthens or draws out the shadows of the pine needles. There's a nice balance and rhythm to the sentence: split in half, with the second half turning on the verb 延长 (lengthen). There's a parallelism between 光线 (light) and 阴影 (shadow), each set at the end of their respective possessive phrases. The sentence as a whole has a nice clumping rhythm which I can only describe as trochaic sextameter (I looked that up): 'DUM-dum DUM-dum da-DUM-dum, DUM-dum da-DUM-dum da-DUM-dum'. Here are some candidates:
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By Eric Abrahamsen, October 14, 11:36a.m.
Poorly Managed, Occasional Bright Spots
I could swear those long-legged seraphs were headhunted from the professional model community in Shanghai and Dalian, but what do I know?
The “18th World Congress of the International Federation of Translators” (Shanghai August 4-6) featured dozens of seminars with over 200 speakers from all over the world—and an opening banquet starring those women, performing what was billed as a Tibetan folk dance.
My neighbors, two immaculately coiffed, fluent English-speaking Iraqi women in China for the first time, were blown away by the spectacle. They couldn’t have cared less where those “Tibetans” came from!
But I wasn’t in town for the dancing. I paid RMB4,000 for entry to the conferences + RMB1,660 for a round-trip air ticket between Shenzhen-Shanghai + RMB800 for 3 nights in a hotel, in the hopes of hearing a host of speakers deliver their (hopefully unique!) presentations.
In the event, most of the seminars were rather disappointing, because:
- Each speaker was strictly limited to 15 minutes, and most Q&A were put off for 30-45 minutes, i.e., until all speakers had first presented;
- Many speakers chose to read out their research papers word-for-word, projecting text-heavy PowerPoint slides virtually identical with their scripts;
- Ironically, only a handful of seminars—this was an international translation conference!—offered simultaneous interpretation;
- There were often 10 or so seminars on at one time on two different floors of the meeting center, each featuring 3-6 speakers, but no obvious way of learning when a given speaker would appear. No list outside the door of each seminar venue, for instance, stating the names of the speakers, their topic, and the order of their appearance.
Nor was much attention given to informing us which scheduled speakers would be absent. I learned only belatedly that Turkish scholar Bengu Ergin would not be presenting “What do we observe in the Chinese translation of Orhan Pamuk’s novel, ‘My Name is Red’?” What a pity!
Ah, well. Here’s a quick list of topics/speakers/e-mail addresses for those topics that might be of interest to Chinese-English translators: “法国对中国现代作家选择之思考” (高方, gaofangparis8@126.com); “Creating the Self-image of New China: ‘Outward’ Literary Translation in the First 17 Years of Socialist China (Ma Shi-Kui, mashikui01@sina.com); “The Chinese-English Parallel Corpus of ‘Hong Lou Meng’: A Working Report” (Liu Ze-Quan, zqliu@ysu.edu.cn); “A Dialectical view of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Non-Chinese’ Features in Chinese Translation Theory” (Tan Zai-Xi, than@hkbu.edu.hk); “A Translation Anthologist’s Reflections on the Ideological Complexities of Translating China” (Martha Cheung, marthach@hkbu.edu.hk).
By Bruce Humes, August 10, 12:37a.m.
My our window on the world is awfully small… It sounds as though there's a fascinating discussion on translation in the latest issue of Calque, a journal of literature in translation, but we wouldn't know if it weren't for Three Percent, who have posted a bit of it:
"To tell the truth, I suspect that readers who can compare translations and originals actually tend to be worse judges of the quality of a translation than people who are unable to read the original. [. . .]
"Of course, readers who can access both the original and the translation are able to find obvious mistakes, and that’s something only they can do, and that can be important. But surely that’s not what we mean when we ask what distinguishes good translations from bad? We’re interested in something that runs deeper, I would hope—not something so superficial that any old multilingual reader can come along and point it out after a hasty comparison of the two texts. [. . .]"
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 30, 12:40p.m.
If I'd ever considered hurling my wooden clogs into the guts of Babelfish's machinery (in a Luddite attempt to preserve my livelihood as a manual laborer of the mind) this should bring some comfort.
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 16, 3:29p.m.
The Transparent China Translator (I)
Li Ji-Hong: Mainland Chinese translator of “The Kite Runner”
By Bruce Humes (徐穆实)
xumushi@yahoo.com
“The Kite Runner” /《追风筝的人》:
An Afgan Childhood Re-Packaged for the Middle Kingdom
It was an intriguing sentence alluding to censorship in the translator’s post-script that initially piqued my curiosity:
原书个别不合国情的地方，译者酌情在措词上加以改动，意思仍一概如旧 (1)
"There are certain places in the original text [of The Kite Runner] which are incompatible with Chinese sensitivities. Measuring his words ever so carefully, the translator has polished the copy while maintaining the original meaning." (My translation)
Now what could there possibly be in a childhood story of friendship, betrayal and a belated but moving coming-of-age, set in Afghanistan – a country hardly figuring on China’s world map – that would ruffle “Chinese sensitivities,” I wondered?
I inquired by e-mail, and the very courteous, frank and highly efficient translator, Mr. Li Ji-Hong (李继宏), kindly told me the answers and much more (see Q&A in full, below).
Indeed, official Chinese censorship has altered “The Kite Runner” (追风筝的人) (2) in some rather odd ways, and I detail them here. But much more significant in shaping the reading experience for the Chinese audience is the translator’s strong preference for what translation scholars dub “domestication.”
Ever wonder what happens to a best-seller in the West when it crosses into Chinese territory? Read on.
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By Bruce Humes, May 13, 9a.m.
Translating Scat – how do you choose the ‘right’ register in English?
Is a taste for ‘scat’ humour cultural? (Sorry, no pun intended!) Reading Cindy Carter’s recent piece Studies in Scat: Excerpts from Yu Hua, Zhu Wen and Li Er about the Chinese scatological sense of humour started me thinking.
What to do if your editor doesn’t like all this talk of crap? My translation of Han Dong’s 扎根, which will appear in English as Banished!, is at the copy-editing stage. The copy editor has put a lot of careful work into correcting my ‘infelicities’ (lovely word!) of expression for which I am extremely grateful, but we have one major disagreement. It’s – you’ve guessed it – the language used to translate those ‘toilet functions’!
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By Nicky Harman, May 9, 1p.m.
We here at Paper Republic strive to bring you the latest and greatest in Chinese language usage, and we’d be criminally unhip if we failed to alert you to the most recent Really Cool Thing on the internet: 囧.
This little beauty is pronounced jiǒng. It is a very old character, appearing on turtle shell inscriptions (甲骨文) from thousands of years ago; while it has many meanings, the most basic is light coming through a window, rather evident from its shape. The more leet among you, however, will note that its also shaped rather like a frowny face: that’s right, 囧 is the hip new way of saying 郁闷 (yùmen, to be bored or depressed or down). Can you feel the grandeur of 5,000 years of history? Read on for advanced usage.
By Eric Abrahamsen, April 25, 2a.m.
The night of March 23, a Sunday night in the brand-new Grand National Theatre, where the National Centre for the Performing Arts was putting on a version of Puccini's Turandot. Ping, one of the emperor's three ministers, stands forward to lament, "O China, o China, che or sussulti e trasecoli inquieta" ("O China, O China, now always startled and aghast, restless"), and what comes up on the Chinese subtitle screen? "O World, O World, now always startled and aghast…"
Because we've become fragile to the point where words of a fictional character in a Western opera written in 1920s are sufficient to bring us down. Or are our national feelings so easily hurt? Or is it part of the gentle campaign to blur the edges of things, to recast what's seen and heard in a way that leaves a false impression, while stopping short of out-and-out dishonesty?
Funny how these little things can touch off the rancor you've otherwise kept well in check…
By Eric Abrahamsen, March 28, 1:13a.m.
The arena: The second floor of the Baiyun Hotel, an enormous official meeting hall some of us have dubbed the Great Hall of the People, complete with velvet curtains, raised podium, and (apparently) refrigerated wooden chairs.
The contestants: Jiang Rong, author of Wolf Totem, and Howard Goldblatt, translator of that novel into English.
The grudge: Billed as a conversation between translator and translatee, the event was actually a chance for Jiang Rong to air his grievances about Howard Goldblatt’s translation. The two are actually pretty chummy, but neither was averse to a little dustup – Goldblatt started off by essentially leaning back, folding his arms, and saying “do your worst”.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, March 28, 12:58a.m.
A while back, I came across a poem Vladimir Nabokov wrote, in Onegin stanzas, justifying his decision to render Eugene Onegin in blank verse. I don't necessarily agree with him that all translations must of necessity be inferior to the original works -- more on this, perhaps, in a future post on David Hawkes and John Minford's masterful translation of 红楼梦 -- but the poem does nicely state the dilemma faced by any translator:
On Translating Eugene Onegin
1
What is translation? On a platter
A poet's pale and glaring head,
A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
The parasites you were so hard on
Are pardoned if I have your pardon,
O, Pushkin, for my stratagem:
I traveled down your secret stem,
And reached the root, and fed upon it;
Then, in a language newly learned,
I grew another stalk and turned
Your stanza patterned on a sonnet,
Into my honest roadside prose--
All thorn, but cousin to your rose.
2
Reflected words can only shiver
Like elongated lights that twist
In the black mirror of a river
Between the city and the mist.
Elusive Pushkin! Persevering,
I still pick up Tatiana's earring,
Still travel with your sullen rake.
I find another man's mistake,
I analyze alliterations
That grace your feasts and haunt the great
Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight.
This is my task--a poet's patience
And scholastic passion blent:
Dove-droppings on your monument.
By Brendan O'Kane, February 11, 5:26p.m.
One of the great mysteries of Chinese to English translation. Mark today on the calendar.
By Eric Abrahamsen, December 10, 3:48p.m.
I'm reading a book by 张翎 (Zhang Ling), a Chinese writer living in Canada, called Mail Order Bride, and have found two good terms so far. One is 思凡 (sīfán), meaning the longing that an immortal, monk or nun feels for the mortal world, and for the company of the opposite sex. The other is 信达雅 (xìndáyă), which represent the three proper principles of translation as laid out by 严复 (Yán Fù), a famous Chinese translator of the late Qing dynasty. 信 indicates 'fidelity', 达 'fluency', and 雅 'grace'. I was pleased to find this.
By Eric Abrahamsen, November 21, 1:09a.m.
- Paste Magazine carries a review of Ha Jin’s newest novel, A Free Life. It seems he’s turned from writing about China from an expat’s vantage point, to writing about America as an immigrant. But 672 pages…?
- Here’s an interesting twist on the journalist’s obligatory China Book: Beijing Confidential is an account written by the Globe and Mail’s former China correspondent, Jan Wong. Wong is Chinese, an alumnus of Peking University, and during the worst of the Cultural Revolution denounced a fellow student, thereby more or less ruining her life. The book is the account of her visit to China in 2003 to find that student, and make some sort of amends.
- Recently I discovered that Chinese ATMs’ habit of asking you, after you’ve finished your business, if you’d like to ‘Print Advice?’ is not the humorous solecism of someone’s electronic dictionary, but rather something we can blame on the British. It seems that there really are ATMs somewhere in England which presume to pronounce upon your personal life, when all you wanted was a record of your transaction. It doesn’t make any sense to them, either.
- A series of recent articles have gotten me all excited about the future of Chinese literature in Western markets. First was this IHT piece, which begins with Xu Xi and goes on to mention a few of the signposts of growing interest in Chinese writing: HarperCollins’ presence here, Penguin’s acquisition of Wolf Totem, and some quotes from Marysia Juszczakiewicz of Creative Work. Then there was this in the Guardian, berating the British for not reading enough translated fiction. Good! Lastly was Nury Vittachi cheerleading for the Man Asian Literary Prize, though since he’s partially responsible for the establishment of the prize, maybe that’s less a sign of the times.
So everything indicates a literary scene that’s trying hard to go global. The publishers are here, and while they’re mostly still huffing and puffing at the water’s edge, they’ll all eventually work up the courage to jump in. But what about readers? The Guardian article is not, when it comes down to it, terribly optimistic about the odds of foreign literature in the UK, and the US is no better. Publishers getting up the gumption to drop cash on a book doesn’t guarantee a readership, especially when no equivalent sum is spent on marketing. Most tellingly, I saw very little discussion of the Man Asian Literary Prize in mainstream western media, or in the literary websites that link together readers, publishers and the media. Sure, it’s a chicken and the egg problem; sure, it’s an evolutionary process, but I’m wondering if that process won’t be a little slower than I’ve been blithely assuming.
- Can someone confirm that, when typing Mongolian or Tibetan into a computer, you first type in Chinese-looking text like so, and then run it through some processor so that it actually comes out in a Mongolian or Tibetan font? This is most curious.
By Eric Abrahamsen, November 20, 6a.m.
- The New York Sun carries a review of a new book about Marco Polo's travels in China and Mongolia.
- The National Library's project to reprint rare works from pre-Qing times is making progress: they've got a complete reprint of the Siku Quanshu (36,381 volumes) and the Yongle Canon (30,000 volumes), and the Dunhuang Manuscripts and the Zhaocheng Tripitaka are not far behind. If this is what the librarians are spending their time doing, I guess we can shelve our complaints about the impossibility of checking a book out of the library.
- Is it that time of the year already? The 2007 Wealthy Writer's List has been unveiled (English summary here), and the suspense is finally broken. Guo Jingming takes top place with 11,000,000 yuan in royalties, followed by some famous academics and many unfamiliar names. Poor Jia Pingwa comes in last, at number 25. What a waste of time this is. And yet, we link to it.
- Lastly, the Mirror publishes a list of untranslatable words and phrases taken from the book Toujours Tingo, apparently we were too late with our niubi entry. Some of the words really do seem untranslatable ("Tartle - Scottish: to hesitate when you are introducing someone whose name you can't quite remember.", "Pisan Zapra - Malay: the time needed to eat a banana.") others seem to have been chosen just for their weirdness ("Bayram Degil Seyran Degil Eniste Beni Niye Optu? - Turkish: there must be something behind this. Literally 'it's not festival time, it's not a pleasure trip, so why did my brother-in-law kiss me?'")
By Eric Abrahamsen, November 8, 6:09p.m.
The idea of ‘untranslatable words’ is very nice. It’s a token of value; it adds a touch of solemn mystery to the work of translation, which otherwise consists mostly of nose-scratching, window-staring, and finding something to weight the book down with. But look, you see? We also have an ineffable something; a tragic ideal; we’re not simply pulling a plow.
Sometimes I think there’s actually such a thing as an untranslatable word, sometimes I don’t. On a good day it seems that any word or phrase could be rendered into English with enough care, even if the word itself vanished and were detectable only through a subtle ruffling of the surrounding text.
But on a bad day, I'm trying to translate níubī.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, October 31, 11:06p.m.
Recently my in-laws came to visit, and while they were here we found ourselves, as is our wont, singing old Cultural Revolution songs. So far 物产阶级文化大革命 The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is Good is my favorite, in part because it’s got a great bouncy rhythm, but mostly because the lyrics are batshit insane. Here’s the chorus:
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is Good,
It is Good,
It is Good,
It is Good.
How’s that for nuance? More comes later, about overthrowing the imperialists, but really all you need to know about the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is in the first, second, third and fourth lines of the chorus. The curious thing about this song is the phrase 就是好, which translates most simply as ‘It is Good’, but actually conveys something along the lines of ‘It is Good (And That’s Final – No Matter What Anyone Says)’.
The point of the song, in other words, is not simply that it’s good, but that it is a priori good; it is good without needing any reason to be good; the answer to the question ‘is it good?’ is already ‘yes’ before the question is even voiced; in fact, we’d really rather you didn’t ask that question, because simply asking sounds suspiciously like doubt. You wouldn’t be looking to get struggled against, would you?
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By Eric Abrahamsen, September 27, 11:57p.m.
I'm re-reading George Steiner's After Babel, one of the great theoretical texts on translation, and this passage made me laugh:
Thus any light I may be able to throw on the nature and poetics of translation between tongues has concomitant bearing on the study of language as a whole. The subject is difficult and ill-defined. Regarding the possible transfer into English of Chinese philosophic concepts, I. A. Richards remarks: 'We have here indeed what may very probably be the most complex type of event yet produced in the evolution of the cosmos.'
By Eric Abrahamsen, August 21, 7:54a.m.
There's a brief but interesting discussion on the Guardian's Book Blog about Kafka, The Metamorphosis, and how much meddling on the part of translator is just enough (via Maud).
By Eric Abrahamsen, June 11, 6:05p.m.
Appalling things northeasterners say.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, April 7, 6:38a.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