Chinese stories

I’ve been working on translating a standard issued by the People’s Bank of China on credit ratings, and have been perplexed by their use of the word 主体. Their standard includes some English definitions that kind of give me a clue as to what they’re talking about. The first is 信用评级主体, which they translate as “subject of credit rating”. This made me think of “subject” as in “subject of an investigation”, but that’s not what they mean. Later it becomes clear that they are using a more philosophical idea of the word subject, as in the subject is the one who acts upon an object: 信用评级机构（行为主体）进行信用评级业务的操作对象（行为客体）”the object (object of the action) of credit rating operations undertaken by a credit rating agency (subject of the action).”

Another translation they give is “corporate credit rating” for 主体信用评级, and here 主体 is clearly the target of the action, the thing being rated. They clarify a little by saying this refers to 经济主体, an “economic agent” or “economic entity”.

Could they be any more confusing?

I haven’t really come across many uses of subject-object 主体-客体 like this in Chinese, but I am wondering if this is a result of the study of Marxism, Maoist thought, and dialectics that virtually every Chinese college student has to undergo?

Then the second use of the term as a corporation seems to be more of a legal concept, as in a legal entity, and when both senses of the word are used together, it gets very confusing trying to figure out what they are talking about.

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Article 9 of the Nationality Law of the People’s Republic of China says:

定居外国的中国公民，自愿加入或取得外国国籍的，即自动丧失中国国籍。

Any Chinese national who has settled abroad and who has been naturalized as a foreign national or has acquired foreign nationality of his own free will shall automatically lose Chinese nationality.

Apparently the “automatically” isn’t so automatic. Our son was born in China, but never got his official papers like a hukou or ID card, and got a US passport shortly thereafter. To leave China, he still had to get an exit permit, though, and it turns out that this has become his most important official Chinese ID. We went to the Chinese consulate in Chicago yesterday to get him a visa to China, only to be told by them that they still consider him a Chinese citizen until he renounces his Chinese citizenship. You can only renounce your citizenship at the PSB in China they said, and he would have to travel to China as a Chinese citizen on a travel permit. The good thing is that this permit costs a lot less than the visa for US citizens, but the bad thing is if he doesn’t renounce his citizenship before he’s 18, he might be stuck in some sort of bureaucratic limbo and never be allowed into China again. Also, the only way he can get this travel permit is with his old exit permit… good thing we didn’t throw it away.

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I wonder, is it “empress dowagers” or “empresses dowager”? I tend to think it is the latter, based on the similar usage in “governors general.” Or, maybe I could just use “dowager empresses” and avoid any controversy.

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Chinese has the tendency to use two characters to represent a four-character phrase, so sometimes you have to guess at what the original four-character phrase was. But if the dictionary you use gives you a four-character phrase made up of two two-character phrases, you start to have a problem. For example, using zdic.net to look up 清秀, you get: 清异秀出. Then you check 清异 and get 清高特异, and check 秀出 and get 美好特出. The more you keep going, the further away from the original definition you get it seems. I think in this case a Chinese-English dictionary might be better, or just go with your gut feeling. I wonder if there is any other language that is as good as Chinese in avoiding giving precise definitions and allowing you to keep going in circles or leading you down the wrong path.

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I’m not sure if it’s just the way the language works, or laziness, but I really get frustrated with the lack of punctuation in Chinese. Maybe it is a holdover from classical times when they just didn’t bother with it, but in some cases I think punctuation in modern Chinese has next to no use. I’ll get a paragraph that reads:

A,B,C,D,E,F.

Where each letter is basically its own little sentence. If I translated this into one giant English sentence, people would think I was nuts. A lot of times I will unconsciously break it down and turn it into:

A and B. C and D. E and F.

Then when I go to proofread it looks stupid. This gives me the right sentence length, but it reads like it was written by a fourth grader. If I do:

A. B. C. D. E. F.

People will still think I’m nuts. So I end up having to add little logical connectors to make the paragraph read somewhat naturally. This is basically what you do when translating classical Chinese, so is there really any difference?

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Here’s one that has been stumping me recently: 器具 (qiju). It basically means 用具, ”something that is used for a certain purpose”, and there really is no single English word that can encompass all of its possible meanings. Some of the dictionaries say: utensil, appliance, instrument, apparatus, implement. But it can also refer to tableware like bowls and dishes and tools, among other things. The article juxtaposes this word with works of art, trying to figure out if there is a distinction between the two. I suppose I will have to settle for something ugly like ‘works of art’ and ‘objects for use’.

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I attended my first ATA conference last week in New York, and I’m definitely glad I went. There was something interesting in most of the presentations I went to, and it was good to actually be able to meet some other translators. 

One thing I found out by attending is how incredibly under-represented Chinese translation is here in the US. There were tons of European languages represented, and even Japanese it seems had a bigger group than the Chinese one. In addition, I could probably count the native English speakers who translated Chinese that showed up on one hand. It still is puzzling to me why the most widely spoken language in the world had such a small turnout… perhaps it’s because most of the translators are located in China? Perhaps its the relatively short history of commercial Chinese translation? They are also trying to set up a Chinese to English certification exam, which is a tough problem, because they cannot find enough graders. I have run into this situation before–I have done trial translations for agencies who could not find anyone competent or willing to evaluate them (out of fear of competition I guess), or who sent me back evaluations that were pure nonsense, obviously not looked at by native speakers. 

The talks I liked the best were probably the ones by interesting people who I have never heard of, such as the guy who does most of the subtitling for Korean dramas into English, and a talk by Edith Grossman, a translator of spanish literature. I also despereately needed to listen to the ergonomics talk, as I have been hunched over a busted up laptop for the past two years, and I don’t think my neck is doing to well. The only dissapointing thing was there really was no talk that was targeted at Chinese to English translators, apart from a discussion on how to translate ‘zheteng’ 折腾.

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It’s been a little over a year since I moved to the US, and I have gradually made the transition to finding more US clients. This has been out of necessity more than anything else, as most Chinese agencies pay rates that fall below US rates, and living here can be pretty expensive, especially when you have a family. There are also hassles with how to get paid, and that come with the time differences. I still haven’t found a good way for Chinese agencies to pay me–bank transfers take a good $30-$40 and a few days to process, and that comes out of your paycheck. Paypal and other services charge ridiculous fees too. I heard the service from xe.com is worthwhile, but I haven’t been able to convince anyone to try it yet. 

But even though the rates for translation don’t usually measure up, I have found that the editing rates in China are not bad based on the amount of time it takes to do the job. The only thing is these are small projects, so the only solution is to have them put the money in a Chinese bank account in RMB. I have found that this is actually kind of useful, as many banks have online payment systems, so if I want a Chinese book off amazon.cn, I can use that RMB account and have it shipped to me in the US (i think shipping is like RMB 100 or somethiing like that, or just have a friend send it over). 

Another thing I like about working with Chinese agencies is that the PMs have knowledge of the languages I work in. In most cases PMs in the US have no knowledge of Chinese, so if I have any issues, I have to figure them out on my own. The Chinese PMs on the other hand have been very helpful, and I like being able to have someone to bounce ideas off of through MSN or Skype or whatever. They also are very helpful just as someone to be able to go to with language problems. I help them out with random questions of theirs, and if I have a weird sentence I can send it over and have them ask their colleagues about it. 

So even though it usually does not get the bills paid, I still like doing jobs for Chinese agencies, because of the other benefits that come with it.

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I had a somewhat strange request last week, as someone wanted me to translate a short sample of machine translated text without looking at the original to show a client that it really could not be used. She gave me a choice between the versions generated by babelfish and google translate to pick the one that was a better translation. They seemed to be at about the same level of gibberish, and I ended up picking the babelfish one. Just as I mentioned in my last post about having trouble with picking the right defiinition for ‘linglong’, the machines clearly have difficulty in determining which definition to choose when there are several possibilities. For example, the topic of the excerpt was chemistry, and uniform became  制服, as in a type of clothing, and thermal bonding became 熱量保稅, using the tax word for bond. Also calling a phone number became 叫, and solid (as opposed to liquid) became 堅實. The translation of ‘flux’ into 漲潮, or rising tide, was another puzzle.

It was also interesting that the paragraph section fared much worse in the machine translation than the bullets. The shorter bullet points were actually somewhat comprehensible, while the longer paragraphs became nonsensical babble. And babble is pretty hard to translate! A lot of times technical paragraphs written by engineers will be quite poorly written, but this takes it to a whole other level. The best way to translate I figured was just word-by-word, as when there is no sensical sentence structure to make out, that’s really all you can do. 

It seems to me that even though machine translation has come a long way, there are just too many variables, including non-textual ones, to consider for it to ever become 100% accurate.

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I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or not when a dictionary lists several widely-varying definitions for one word, all of which would make acceptable translations. And I’m not one for blindly following the dictionary in every case, but at least I expect the dictionary to help me narrow down my choices, rather than expand them. This is the case for the word ‘linglong’ 玲珑, which I always look up when I come across it, even for the 436th time, and the dictionary almost never helps me. So what is a translator to do?

In this case the word is a poetic one, often found in classical literature, meaning it has a ton of connotations. A quick check of a few C-E online and hard copy dictionaries comes up with ‘ingeneously and delicately wrought’, ‘exquisite’, ‘nimble’, and ‘tinkling of jade’. The 古代汉语词典 (a dictionary that I hardly ever find has the words I am looking for) gives ‘clear and crisp sound’ and ‘clear and transparent’.  Then finally,  汉典, which I tend to trust more than any other dictionary, especially for literary translation, gives no less than eight definitions: 1) the clear sound of jade; 2) transparent; 3) used in poetry to refer to plum blossomes or snow; 4) exquisite; 5) nimble; 6) refers to the Tang courtesan Shang Linglong; 7) refers to courtesans in general; the name of a musical movement. 

And the context is that it is being used to describe glass bead curtains. Now bead curtains certainly tinkle like jade, are transparent, are exquisitely wrought, might look like snow in the bright sun, and their movement is nimble. Since it appears in poetry, pretty much anything goes, so I suppose the translator has to try to figure it out from context or commentary, or just make a choice.  

What I have to work with:

马祖常《咏琉璃帘》：“吴侬巧制玉玲珑”

李白《玉阶怨》：“却下水精帘，玲珑望秋月”

温庭筠《菩萨蛮》：“竹风轻动庭除冷，珠帘月上玲珑影”

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