Chinese stories

These lessons about food are probably learned the hard way by most of us. Having a two-year-old at home, I wonder if this doesn’t apply to kids as well, but I think with them the sugar content and green leafy vegetable content is more important.

《礼记·檀弓下》“齐大饥，黔敖为食于路，以待饿者而食之。有饿者蒙蚗辑履，贸贸然来。黔敖左奉食右执饮曰：嗟，来食！扬其目而视之，予不食嗟来之食，以至于斯也。从而谢焉。终不食而死。”

Book of Rites: Tenggong xia: “There was once a great famine in Qi. Qian Ao was preparing food along the road, waiting for the hungry to come along and eat. A hungry man with tattered shoes came along listlessly, covering his face. Qian Ao held out some food in his left hand and some drink in his right hand and called out: ‘Hey, come eat!’ The hungry man looked at him and said, ‘I came to be like this because I do not take food from those who shout at me.’ Qian Ao went after the man and apologized, but he refused to eat and eventually died.”

《孟子·告子上》“一箪食，一豆羹，得之则生，弗得则死；呼尔而与之，行道之人弗受；蹴尔而与之，乞人不屑也。万锺则不辨礼义而受之，万锺于我何加焉？”

Mencius: Gaozi shang: “A basket of rice and a bowl of soup: if we have these things, we live and if not, we die. If they are offered with scorn, passersby will not accept them. If they are stepped on and then offered, even beggars will look down upon them. If I am offered a high salary, and take it without considering whether it is proper or right, what good are the riches to me?”

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We seriously need a guide to the translation of Chinese plant names into English. One of my favorite bathroom reading books is 《红楼梦植物图鉴》 (Pictorial Guide to the Plants of Dream of the Red Chamber), but that’s the extent of my knowledge on the subject, and it only offers the scientific plant names in English, which is OK I guess if you’re a devout follower of the Peter Boodberg school of translation. I’d be happy to write the guide myself, but it’ll have to wait until I take a class or two on botany. Actually the subject probably deserves a Ph.D. dissertation, I think it’s that important, but I’d really settle for anything at this point.

(comments on older posts turned off until the spam posts die down…I’ve totally given up on the wiki)

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The problem with classical Chinese is that I never can seem to catch the tone of it when reading the original version for the first time. I’ve been working on this part of Xunzi:

略法先王而不知其统，犹然而材剧志大，闻见杂博，案往旧造说，谓之五行。甚僻违而无类，幽隐而无说，闭约而无解，案饰其辞而祗敬之曰：此真先君子之言也。子思唱之，孟轲和之。

Which turns out to be a harsh critique of Zisi and Mencius, but on the first reading I really didn’t pick up on it, until I read John Knoblock’s translation:

Some men follow the model of the Ancient Kings in a fragmentary way, but they do not understand its guiding principles. Still their abilities are manifold, their memory great, and their experience and knowledge both varied and broad. They have initiated a Theory for which they claim great antiquity, calling it the Five Processes theory. Peculiar and unreasonable in the extreme, it lacks proper logical categories. Mysterious and enigmatic, it lacks a satisfactory theoretical basis. Esoteric and laconic in its statements, it lacks adequate explanations. To give their propositions a cloak of respectability and to win respect and veneration for them, they claim: These doctrines represent the genuine words of the gentleman of former times. Zisi provided the tune for them, and Mencius harmonized it.

Pretty harsh stuff. I gave it a go and came up with:

There are those who somewhat model themselves after the former kings, but do not know their unifying principles. They are complacent, have impressive abilities and immense memories, and have varied and broad experience. They have created a theory supposedly based on antiquity and called it the five modes of conduct. It is extremely misguided and lacks order, it is occluded and lacks a theoretical basis, it is stilted and lacks explanation. They have tried to dress up their statements and instill them with reverence by saying that these were the words of the former masters. Zisi led them, and Mencius followed.

The problem is I am never sure how to really capture the tone of the original, since I obviously didn’t pick up on it the first time I read it. So do I base my judgment of the tone on Knoblock’s translation or the modern Chinese translation or what? I suppose the only solution to this problem is to read a truckload of classical Chinese so I can someday be able to determine this for myself?

(As an aside, I wonder what happened to 犹然 in Knoblock’s translation. Did it just get translated as “still”?)

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After moving to the states from Beijing, I have gotten a lot more jobs translating materials from Taiwan or Hong Kong, which has been challenging, because they use quite different language a lot of the time. Names and addresses in particular are tough. I suppose translating Cantonese names wouldn’t be a big deal if people followed any standard way of writing them. But as far as I can tell, it’s completely arbitrary, making the job of translating them nearly impossible. Here is one example:

The capitalized names are the last names. The last name can appear basically anywhere in the name, and many people take English names as well. Some people abbreviate, some hyphenate, some write each character as a separate word, and many people use different romanizations. If the person isn’t well-known and have their name on the internet, the best it seems I can do is check wiktionary for the Yale Cantonese pronunciation and use that.

I won’t even get started on Taiwanese romanization…

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I’m trying to check 汉典, one of mainland China’s largest online dictionaries, for the character “同” and I get this message:

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Well, no sooner did I post about not doing interpreting anymore, when I got a call for a job. I still am not sure about how much, if any, of my time I want to spend interpreting, but I figure I shouldn’t completely rule it out without giving it a go for a few times. Interpreting is definitely more intense, especially when the person you are interpreting for is under oath, and basically everything you say, including mistakes, could have major consequences. I find that after interpreting I have an inclination to want to listen to loud music, while after translating a big job I just want to take a bath.

I think interpreting does help translating, though, as it helps you think about words differently. For example, I was interpreting the word qizha 欺诈 for someone under oath in a legal setting. If I were translating I might pop open my trusty dictionary and find the definition “fraud.” Other definitions are to “cheat,” “deceive,” or “swindle.” Now, in my mind fraud is quite a strong word, and has much more serious connotations than “cheat.” I believe this person also interchanged this word for qipian 欺骗 a few times, and to me this seems to be a little less formal and serious than 欺诈. The context was that the speaker was accusing another person of such behavior, but it didn’t seem to me like they were accusing the person necessarily of a serious crime, but rather of not being completely up front about everything, and that if I used the word “fraud,” this might lead to an unduly intense reaction from the other side. So for some reason I opened my mouth and out came “unforthright behavior.” Now, I’m not even sure if this is a word, but it seems like it was the right thing to say in the situation. It didn’t sound childish like “he tricked me!” and wasn’t accusatory like “he committed fraud.” Plus, its always fun to make up new dictionary entries, they’re never right half the time anyway. (And it kind of sounds like legalese, so bonus points with the lawyers there.)

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I was just thinking this morning about how my location has affected the development of my translation career so far. Basically, when I moved back to the US in 2008 I had to start over new by finding US clients and agencies to work with while still taking jobs from old Chinese clients and agencies. Since I was supporting a family of three, I basically had to take any job that came my way, rather than setting my own goals for how I wanted my career to develop. After living in Michigan for nearly two years now, I have found that there are barely any interpreting jobs here (I have been contacted for two since I’ve been here, and didn’t end up doing either of them), which has meant that I have been doing translation almost exclusively. However, I have been contacted or heard about lots of interpreting jobs around New York, Florida, Philadelphia, etc., and I’m starting to think that if I had moved to one of those places, I might have become a full-fledged interpreter rather than a translator.

I spent some time with an artist I do some work for recently, and mentioned to her that I had gotten certification as a court interpreter, and she looked at me funny and said, “is that what you really want to do?” I guess I had never really thought about it, since at the time I was just doing anything I could to find more work, but now that I have enough work, I’m thinking that perhaps I should take more of an artist’s mindset and think more about what I want to do rather than taking everything that comes along. I think I just don’t hang out enough around artists–most of my friends and family are scientists and engineers, and that gives them a different outlook on things. Some people also take a business-minded approach to translation and tell me to start up a company. But I think taking an artist’s approach is the best thing for me at the moment, because artists love what they do and think carefully about what they want to do before setting out to do it. Hopefully its possible for translators to do that as well.

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I’ve been trying to add to my library lately, and am getting frustrated at the lack of affordable and accessible translations of many of the Chinese classics. Something like what Penguin Classics offers is what I’m looking for, but they only have the Daodejing, Analects, Mencius, and Songs of the South. I think Waley’s Book of Songs can be found in an affordable paperback version as well. For something like the Liji, though, which I admit would be a pain to translate, there’s nothing. For some of the other major philosophers like Mozi and Xunzi, there are excellent scholarly translations, but they run at least $60 a volume, and sometimes there are two or three volumes. The affordable versions of these works, translated by Burton Watson, are not complete translations. A. C. Graham has a translation of Zhuangzi, but you need a Ph.D. to try to figure out how he rearranged all the chapters. James Crump translated the Zhanguoce, but it is also quite expensive. We need something like the set of Chinese classics translated by James Legge. I don’t think they were necessarily affordable when they were just published, but they were complete and easy to use. In some cases it is hard to believe that more than a century has passed, and Legge’s translations are still the most accessible (mostly because they are posted all over the internet) unless you live near the library of a major university.

I admit there are affordable translations that come from Chinese publishers, but I tend not to trust the editorial quality of these types of books, and they are not readily accessible in the US. There are also plenty of accessible translations posted online, but sometimes you just need a book that you can make notes in and pull off the shelf at a moment’s notice, or whatever. What we need is a set of functional paperback translations of all of the major Chinese classics that can be sold in regular bookstores and used in undergraduate classes. For more demanding readers there will always be the scholarly translations, but right now we really need something like an update to James Legge in paperback form.

I also admit most of it would be a slog, which is probably why it hasn’t been done yet. But I think that is the nature of the Chinese classics, and that translations that just pick and chooses the ‘good parts’ just aren’t enough anymore. And in most cases, a generation or so has passed since the most accessible translations first came out: Crump and Waley have passed away, and Watson and Lau were born in the 1920s. Academics nowadays can’t afford to put out a translation without a big introduction and lots of endnotes because it would hurt their career, and the publishers haven’t found the need to get it done yet. Too bad the category of translator/missionary doesn’t really exist anymore.

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An article I was working on was giving a definition of “close relatives” (直系亲属), and given how complicated names are for relatives in China, it’s probably no surprise that the definition was rather long. The first part, “parents, brothers, sisters, and children and their spouses” wasn’t too bad: 父母、兄弟、姐妹、儿女以及各自的配偶

Then came the hard part: how do you think they said “cousins, nephews, nieces, and uncles and their spouses”?

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Over four plus years of freelancing I’ve done a fair amount of trial translations for clients and agencies so they can decide if they want to work with me. I don’t really mind doing them, as long as the process is reasonable and fair. Perhaps this is just for my language pair, but over the years I have come to notice that the larger the agency is, the more likely it is to have some sort of absurd testing and acceptance process. It  has come to the point that whenever I do a test for a big agency, I hold very low expectations for the outcome. For some reason, I have never had such a problem with smaller agencies.

Some of the things I have encountered include: unreasonably long tests (like 2,000 words in four different subject areas), negative test feedback received that is immediately recognizable as coming from a non-native speaker, impossible guidelines such as telling me the test should be doable within 2 hours when 5-6 hours is needed, completing the test to have the PM tell me they could not find a reviewer because other agencies don’t want more competition, and positive feedback but rejection anyway.

Perhaps it is because the larger a company gets, the more likely it is to have strange procedures and Q/A processes?

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