Chinese stories

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’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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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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Of course there are advantages and disadvantages of where you are based if you are a translator. When I was in China I lived in the language and it was much easier to keep up on the latest slang and usage, and there were more native speakers to get help from if I was stumped. In the US I’m more in tune with my target language, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing I suppose. One thing I was pleasantly surprised with upon moving back here was being able to rediscover the local libraries. Not only do they have full seasons of TV shows I have missed, but also books that have helped me in my translation work. I’d say that I have benefitted from visiting a library for every single one of the larger projects that I have worked on this year. Mostly I visited the research library at a local public university, but the city libraries have actually helped out a lot as well. 

In China on the other hand, I dread the thought of going to the library. When I first came to China to teach English I was denied access to the university library even though I was a teacher at the school. Other than that only made one or two trips to the Peking U. library, and never got to visit the Bookworm, so I can’t say that I’m an expert by any means. But taking the Peking U. library for an example, I remember going once on a weekend to find that visitors were only allowed in on weekdays during business hours. So I came again during the week, and I had to hand over my passport to an old man near the entrance who kept it in a drawer of a little wooden desk. 

When I was in graduate school I had some conversations with veterans of doing research in China who had plenty of horror stories about trying to penetrate the defenses of the Chinese libraries. One of them told me I had to be well prepared in advance with lots of cash on hand, a tiny camera to secretly take pictures of the materials with, and lots of time. Some people hired a helper to copy out materials by hand. One of my professors even described Chinese libraries as being more like 藏书楼, or book storehouses, rather than lending facilities. 

Not that they don’t have some great materials in their libraries, but as a Chinese to English translator, I mostly need to find out how to write about things in English. Even though I live in the middle of nowhere Southwest Michigan, if I need, say, to access a 1972 copy of some economics journal, I just head over to the local research library, and can get what I need in less than an hour. It’s sad, though, to see that many public libraries here are having their budgets cut due to the economic crisis.

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