Off-topic: "Those from Taiwan know their Chinese but not their English..."

A recent topic in a Chinese forum titled http://bbs.gxsd.com.cn/archiver/?tid-477193.html

Levels of translation quality proposed by Yan Fu: A small example

Yan Fu (严复, 1854-1921), a thinker, translator and educator, proposed three levels of translation quality, i.e., progressively, 信, 达, 雅, roughly, fidelity to the original, sentence fluency, and elegance of the translation, respectively. Numerous books and articles talk about these standards. I just want to give a simple case to illustrate the point. At my first job after graduation in China, I worked with a coworker that recently graduated just like me, except she had an English major. One day she suggested we translate a short paragraph in an English novel, separately. I don't remember any part of it, except this sentence, "He put his hands on her waist". Naturally, my translation goes, "他把手放在她的腰上". Then I looked at hers, which is "他搂着她的腰". I almost gasped at the perfect choice of the word (or character) "搂" (hug or embrace). I don't know why she picked that paragraph to test my translating skills, perhaps because she or her teacher or schoolmates tested it before and found it interesting.

Back to the 信-达-雅 standard. No doubt my translation has fidelity (I got the meaning right), and fluency (the Chinese sentence is natural and understandable), but definitely lacks elegance. If the material were from a technical book instead of a novel, my rendering of "put hands on" would be good, or even better without elegance. But it's a novel, a literary piece of art. Mr. Yan's highest standard 雅 is not just desired, but really demanded!

On the other hand, the original sentence, "He put his hands on her waist", begs the question whether it's elegant in itself. I think not. Should the translator inject a bit of literary element in translation? Well, I guess it depends. In this case, it looks appropriate. It's not uncommon a translated piece of work is more beautiful than the original, although the opposite is more common.

Proper name translation (2): standardization

This is a sequel to Proper name translation: semantic or phonetic. Proper names pose a challenge to translation not because of the language, but because of their unique features. Selection of semantic or phonetic translation is only one of them. A more common problem may be standardization. This is not obvious to English-speaking people, who are used to translated names in English provided on the source side by the translators of the originating language. But occasionally, there are no source side translators. Shortly after 9-11 of 2001, bin Laden's name was spelled differently in various writings. I contacted pbs.org regarding their spelling in a 3(?)-part long article. They explained the name was being standardized at the moment.

I used to work at an organization in China officially designated as the agency translating the United Nations documents into Chinese. Choosing correct Chinese characters for proper names is a big deal. We follow certain sources in sequence: check the People's Daily first, check ... (some other official news media), check less authoritative newspaper, and so on. If the name in Chinese is still not found, use a standard proper name translation dictionary. Yes, such a dictionary does exist. Nevertheless, proper names are still translated differently across different regions where the Chinese language is spoken, such as mainland and Taiwan.

Off-topic: What language is popular?

There are many ways to gauge what foreign language is popular. One way is to check how many books are at a bookstore. I went to a local Borders Bookstore and noted down the following. The numbers are the numbers of book shelves holding books for that language (self-study books, dictionaries, easy readers, etc):

Arabic: 1
Chinese: 1
French: 4
German:: 2
(ancient) Greek: ?
Italian: 3
Japanese: 2
Korean: less than 0.5
Latin: 1.5
Portuguese: 1
Russian: less than 1
Spanish: too many

Even if this were not in south Texas, I bet Spanish would still beat any other language. I'm surprised at the high number for French and relatively low number for Chinese, considering the fact that more high schools or junior high have both as foreign languages. But that's what the market is, or at least what the bookstore follows.

[Update] This posting has a follow-up in 2015: What language is popular? A revisit.

"有情人终成眷属" and "Money talks" on Google Translate

Google Translate is increasingly popular. But more mistakes are also being found, especially when idioms are translated. One salient example is the Chinese-to-English translation of "有情人终成眷属" [People in love eventually get married], which is translated as "Money talks" [有钱能使鬼推磨]. I checked a few other languages I know, such as French and Spanish, where the translation is "L'argent parle" and "El dinero habla", respectively. They both literally mean "Money talks".

How does this or this kind of errors occur? According to Inside Google Translate, Google Translate "looks for patterns in hundreds of millions of documents to help decide on the best translation for you". Let's check those "millions of documents" for this particular idiom. Search for
"有情人终成眷属" "money talks"
quotation marks included, and the result is 31300 hits as of this writing. Most indeed bear titles associating the Chinese idiom with "money talks". But some are apparently talking about Google Translate's mistake. So to be fair, we need to filter them out. Try excluding "Google" with the minus operator
"有情人终成眷属" "money talks" -google -"谷歌"
Again, quotation marks included. The result is 26400 hits. The first hit

Album : Money talks
Chinese : 有情人终成眷属  (You Qing Ren Zhong Cheng Juan Zhu)
Artist : Zheng Yuan (郑源 Zheng Yuan)
Release Date : 1/18/2006

Proper name translation: semantic or phonetic

In researching a subject in history of Chongqing, I came across various English translations of the name of a building, "白公馆" in Chinese, e.g. "Bai Mansion", "Baigong Guan", "Baigongguan", "White Residence", "White House".[note] The interesting part is the translation of "白". Should it be phonetically "Bai" or semantically "White"? The answer is, It depends on the origin of the name. According to Baidu, this building was named after its owner Bai Ju (surname Bai). So the correct translation must be phonetic. "Bai Mansion" may be the best, although "Baigongguan" serves well as the name of a place. I don't suppose Mr. Bai, the owner, called it "白公馆" with intention of using a pun. But if he had done so, our translation would be impossible, or you pick one you like.

This reminds me of the translation of "Rice University", a reputable college in Texas. In the late 1980's, people in China referred to it as either "莱斯大学" or "稻米大学". But since the school was named after a person, as was known to all later, only the translation "莱斯大学" survived.

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[note] If you need to see who uses which term, use these keywords to search on Google (quotation marks matter; example for "Bai Mansion"):
"白公馆" "重庆" "bai mansion"
chongqing "bai mansion"
chungking "bai mansion"

"最近" is not always "recently"

I've seen too many Chinese use the word "recently" to translate "最近" incorrectly. Dict.org explains "recently" as "in the recent past" or "not long since". It clearly indicates the past tense, as in "I bought a car recently", "我最近买了一辆车". But "我最近准备买一辆车" should be "I'm going to/I'm planning to buy a car soon", not "...recently". This mistake is made presumably because the English textbooks in Chinese equate "最近" with "recently" without pointing out the tense it should be used in. Interestingly, the Chinese having immigrated to English-speaking countries subconsciously avoid using the word "最近" in future tense *in Chinese conversations*; they tend to use the word "很快" [literally "very quickly" but more appropriately "soon"], as in "我很快要买一辆车", which reflects the influence of language on thought.

Translation of a sentence in Classical Chinese

> 一句文言，大家看怎么翻译合适？
> “民困于贪残之政，故托言大鼠害己而去之也。”

This is a classical or literary Chinese sentence from "Interpretation of The Book of Songs"(《诗集传》) by Zhu Xi (Chu Hsi, 朱熹), who lived in the Song Dynasty more than 800 years ago. I hope the following translation is close:


The people suffer under the government of greed and cruelty. So the author allegorically talks about rats that cause harm to him and his attempts to get rid of them.

Requested to translate a poem

> Hi there, a friend of mine gave me your email as a way to
> translate Chinese to English.  I have attached a picture.
> Can you help?

This is a poem. So my translation may be crude by the literary standard. It goes like this:

The eagle flies, the tiger roars, resonating in the river and mountains
Deep valley, sound of tide, a whole night's wind
High flying eagle, ferocious tiger, have great ambitions

by Zhang Baiyun
in early winter of year XX (maybe 1963?)

I'm not quite sure of the first of the two letters representing the year. If it's 癸, the year may be 1963 or any year matching the formula: 1963-60*n (i.e. 1963 minus 60 times n), where n is an integer. (Ref)

The three seals all bear the name of the calligrapher (possibly author too)

Normally, a poem should have four lines. I don't know why this Mr/Ms Zhang only had three.

Off-topic: Travel to Chongqing

http://yong321.freeshell.org/misc/TravelToChongqing.html

"an amateur historian's cultural trip"

Some interesting comments extracted below:

(About an altercation provoked by a stranger trying to cut in line) While Confucianism brings family members extremely close to each other, and also friends to some extent, this religion or philosophy alienates strangers, i.e. people of no family or friend relationship, beyond indifference and sometimes to the extent of hostility.
...

(About scenery of the Three Gorges for landscape painting) What puzzles me and the people I ask everywhere is that these stunningly beautiful mountains and thousand-feet high cliffs never went into ancient painters' vision, even though famous poets in the Tang dynasty wrote about them. This can't be explained in the same way that Jiuzhaigou or Guilin of natural beauty no less than that of the three gorges was also not in ancient paintings, because the latter were either physically inaccessible in ancient times, or rarely stepped on due to occupation of a non-Han civilization.
...

(On viewing the exhibition of the Sino-Japanese War) Not all feuds are created equal. Forty years after the Korean war, Chinese and American then pilots could meet and chat about their air fights as if they were playing a game. During the 1979 China-Vietnam war, soldiers reportedly exchanged canned food during the intermission of a battle or perhaps lunch time. But the two belligerents of the Sino-Japanese war would never come to terms in this life or the next, as if a threshold of human indignation was surpassed.
...

(On visiting Dazu Rock Carvings) unlike Christianity or Islam, Buddhism does not exclude other religions, and the Chinese religions or doctrines care even less whether you worship another god or God privately or publicly.