Chinese stories

There are two obituaries about the passing of translators in today’s Beijing News. One is Chen Bingyi 陈冰夷, who was a translator of Russian, and a founder of “World Literature” 世界文学 along with Mao Dun, and the other is Cai Hui 蔡慧, whose obituary I have translated here:

Translator Cai Hui Dies

Did not get to see his beloved new translation of The Gadfly published

(Cao Xueping reporting) Cai Hui, whose translations include Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead passed away in Shanghai from liver cancer on February 10th at the age of 77. Regrettably, he did not get to see his beloved translation of The Gadfly published, as this novel still has three years before it enters the public domain.

Rong Rude, co-translator with Cai Hui of Gone With the Wind said, “In this day and age, there are not many true translators of literature, and even fewer who make their living off translation—Cai Hui was one of them.” Before the Cultural Revolution, there was an editing house in Shanghai whose employees all engaged in translating foreign literature, and who all made a living on their translation fees. In the 90s, the translator Cao Ying suggested that such translators go to work in the Shanghai Cultural History Museum, so they would have a steady income. To them, translation was something that gave them pleasure.

Those who often worked with Cai Hui knew that he did not take directions from publishing houses on what to translate—if he liked a work, he would put all his heart into making a good translation, then send it to a publisher. Before he passed away, his thoughts were often on The Gadfly. He began a new translation of The Gadfly that corrected many mistakes of the old version. After he gave it to the publisher, he found that the Chinese copyright for this work had been taken out by Lijiang Publishing, and after negotiations agreed to stop publishing it after 100,000 volumes of its translation have been sold. This was a great blow to Cai Hui, as he would have to wait until 2011, when the work enters the public domain, for his new The Gadfly to reach readers. Before passing, he entrusted Rong Rude with this matter.

On Cai Hui’s translating style, many of his colleagues said it was “finely crafted through painstaking labor” (慢功出细活), which is precisely a quality young translators are lacking nowadays. Unfortunately, the reaction within China to his representative translation The Naked and the Dead does not live up to the hard work that was put into it. Zhang Jianping, the chief editor of the Shanghai Translation Publishing Company’s Literature department said that Cai Hui’s translation saved the editors a lot of work, because he is known for using authentic Chinese—often the original would be ambiguous in places, and Cai Hui would digest the meaning for a while, and come up with a clear, unambiguous translation. Zhang Jianping also said that the unmarried Cai Hui lived a low-key life, and during the 14 months that he was in the hospital, his colleagues wanted to go see him, but he turned them away, not wanting to waste their time.

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Call me biased for putting up a link to a 老乡, but being from Kalamazoo, MI, I was pleased to find the blog Myth of Arrival by Grand Rapids poet Zachary Chartkoff.  He translates poetry into and out of many languages, including Chinese. His translations of Chinese poetry mostly focus on women writers–Qiu Jin and others. I admire his courage for not being afraid to work in languages that he is not strongest in. To do this he gets help from other users of poetry websites and forums from around the world.

My wife didn’t want me to go through with my plan for my second post on websites dedicated to translating western TV shows into Chinese. (I like how Chinese people group Europe and America into one big group 欧美剧 and don’t really make any distinctions between the two. The typical American view is that Europe is something totally different, and anything non-American or European falls within one blurry spectrum of other foreign things.) But then she put the links up on my wiki, and even if I deleted them they would still be in the wiki history. Once something is saved to a wiki, is it ever possible to completely get rid of all traces of it?

So, to compromise, I won’t link to them or mention their names in this post, but they’re pretty easy to find. She didn’t want me to post them, because if word gets out, the television stations will put pressure on the government to crack down on them. The sites are basically forums that provide links to the means to download the shows, summaries of the shows and every episode, and an online community for the translators and subtitlers of the shows (all done for free of course). They usually provide rewards for spotting errors in the translations, so if a member sees a mistranslation at 4:30, he can post the error on the forum in exchange for bonus points or an increased reputation.

I feel that it would not be in the networks best interest to try to crack down on these sites. After all, there are tons of western TV shows available on the Chinese video sharing sites, as those sites don’t have to deal with the copyright problems that Youtube does. Furthermore, these sites are developing huge fan bases for these American shows that would otherwise never be seen by ordinary Chinese people. Why not work with these sites and try to provide some sort of streaming video or other form of distribution of the shows on a pay-per-view basis? (Using pre-paid cards I suppose.) The networks must be able to find some way to benefit off these dedicated fans. After all, if the sites get shut down, the viewers will switch to whatever else is available, like Korean dramas or China’s dark horse, CCTV9. （OK, just kidding about that last one.)

In case you’re wondering, here’s the Wiki

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Here is what we saw at midnight for Spring Festival 2008 in Beijing:

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