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 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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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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Sometimes when I have a big project I get to the point where I just can’t use the computer any more. Either my eyes start to glaze over or my back hurts from sitting in the same position. If I have to keep going, I usually then take a printout of whatever it is I’m working on and a notebook and sit down somewhere to translate by hand. After doing this a few times I have found that I actually really enjoy this type of translation as opposed to working on the computer. First of all, I am forced to ponder over words that I am not quite sure how to translate without having the luxury of being able to immediately punch them into an online dictionary, or, if I am completely stumped, to skip the word and keep going. Actually, most of the time my guess can be pretty accurate, and I think this can help avoid being misled by a lot of the strange translations that dictionaries tend to give sometimes. This also helps avoid translator’s block, as you just move on and come back to the sentence later. Paper translation also gives me more time to think about an entire sentence or paragraph and get a feel for the work as a whole, whereas on the computer I tend to focus more on getting each word just right.

The drawbacks are that it is a slower process, and once I finish the paper translation I have to go back and input it into the computer while looking up the words I skipped before. However, this also gives me a second look at what I’ve written, and makes the editing process easier I think, and skipping the more troublesome parts allows for some pretty fast translating. It also lets me translate standing up, lying down, in bed, or wherever.

So I don’t think translators had it all that bad before computers came along. The only problem would be lugging a bunch of dictionaries around, but one can get by fairly well with a good knowledge of the language and subject area. Does McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ apply to translation as well?

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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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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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