Chinese Dance "Flower Kidney"

My kids were reading the English version of the program for an end-of-year show in the Chinese community. They had doubt about the last one in the list, supposed to be the most exciting among all, "Flower Kidney". That doesn't sound right to them, or to me. If you have some knowledge of Chinese folk dance and also enjoy Chinese cuisine (a really Chinese one), you may guess what the Chinese title for the dance is: 花腰花.

What the hell is this? And Why is it linked to kidney? Here's my guess (and I can pretty much guarantee the accuracy). Go to Google Translate:
http://translate.google.com/#zh-CN|en|%E8%8A%B1%E8%85%B0%E8%8A%B1
and see what it is. That's right. The first 花 is "flower" and the two characters "腰花" is kidney, as in "炒腰花"  or stir-fry (pig) kidney.

So, what is exactly this dance? Ignorant of Chinese folk dance, I have to hazard a guess. "腰花" is likely some dance stressing the waist (pun intended) of the dancer, not sure how the name came about. The first "花" is unlikely related to Flowers, but instead suggests variations of a standard pattern, as is often the case in traditional Chinese folk music. Therefore, the most appropriate literal translation is probably "Waist Dance With Variations". Prepend "Chinese" and add translator's note, as you wish.

(On the other hand, I bet the waist dance indeed can be related to kidneys, in the sense that it improves your health if practiced moderately, or degrades it or harms the kidneys if otherwise.）

Why the Chinese language should not adopt phonetic writing?

This is part of a comment posted to Xujun Eberline's blog Will Chinese Go Alphabetic? Re-posted here as a standalone piece. "Phonetic" and "alphabetic" are used interchangeably when referring to a writing system.

There's an often-forgotten aspect of the resistance against Chinese romanization: unification of China. A number of scholars have expounded this idea since about one hundred years ago. The earliest I read is from Sun Yat-sen in his "Three Principles of the People". If China were to use an alphabetic writing system, people in different regions of China would soon find it impossible to communicate with each other due to great differences in pronunciation of the dialects, and China would disintegrate into many small countries as Europe. Sun's voice might appear weak against the few prominent figures in the 1920's and 1930's advocating romanization, because Sun's major concern was something bigger. In fact, that idea is largely unknown to most people, in spite of reiteration by a few scholars mostly in Taiwan. Generally, in the past 100 years, when the Chinese woke up to the fact that China is weak in power, romanization of the Chinese writing system would gain momentum, and subside in other times. I think the latest wave was in the 1980's, on a much smaller scale than its predecessors. With economic boom in recent decades, romanization is only a wishful thinking of the foreign students interested in something about China except the language itself.

To be fair, I think it's proven that children spend more time studying Chinese to a literacy level than studying an alphabetic language. But in view of the benefit of national unity, and to a lesser extent, artistic and literary beauty, let the kids, or foreign students, suffer! (By the way, I'm not sure if there's proof that simplified Chinese takes less time to learn than the non-simplified, but all anecdotal evidence suggests so.)

Technical document needs literal translation

A question recently posted to a Chinese database forum is about the translation of the Oracle database term "recursive call" as "递归调用". That's a perfect literal translation. But the problem is that the word "recursive" or "递归" in computer programming refers to the fact that a function calls itself, as in this pseudo code:

function f()
{ //some condition to stop the loop
  call f();
}

In case of Oracle, a recursive call has nothing to do with calling the function or routine from within itself. Instead, it refers to a background, lower-level, normally database kernel-level, function call, not issued by the user. (In case of PL/SQL, it's a user-written SQL modified by the PL/SQL engine behind the scenes.)

This is an interesting topic about translation in that I believe, all technical translation should be literal, using the word, in the target language, that has long been established as a proper translation. In this case, "recursive" has only one translation, "递归" in Chinese, with no other choice. As to whether the original document used the correct word, it's the original author's responsibility. A translator can add a translator's note to his translation, but should not choose a word that he thinks more closely matches the original meaning.

Similarly, "object-oriented programming" should indeed be translated as "面向对象的编程", even though I think "object-central", "object-centered", or "object-focus" would be better in the original language. And Oracle's "recursive call" may simply be called "lower-level call", so as to not raise the eye-brow of a seasoned programmer unnecessarily, not to mention the fact that an Oracle PL/SQL programmer may actually write code that has a real recursive call as in this example.

Having said that, I won't go further to say Christopher Columbus' "Indian" should be translated as "印度人" instead of "印第安人", which is a perfect translation. Columbus made a big mistake to equate American Indians to Indian Indians (so to speak). An obvious mistake is better corrected in translation if incorrect in the original language. But a word only questionable in the source is better left alone in the target language. After all, a translator may do more wrong in trying to outsmart the original author, causing endless confusion among the readers of the translation.

Chinese Accent in English Pronunciation

One could write a dissertation on foreign language accent. But here's a little observation I made after my recent reading on phonology. Some Chinese have a hard time to pronounce [ʌ] as in 'but' correctly, substituting [a] as in Chinese "阿" for it. But those living in an English-speaking country long enough can easily make a distinction not only in listening, but in pronouncing it as well. Now comes the more difficult one, the difference between [a] ("阿") and [ɑ] (as in "palm"). I knew the difference and subconsciously made the distinction in pronouncing "阿" and "palm" in its own context and language. But I had not realized the International Phonetic Alphabet actually used two different symbols to represent them until recently I did some casual reading of Wang Li's Chinese Phonology (汉语音韵) and Bernhard Karlgren's book on the same subject. So what's the difference between these two vowels? A good explanation is in the vowel chart of the IPA. For native Chinese, all [ɑ] needs is to move the tongue slightly toward the back from where it is needed to pronounce the Chinese [a] ("阿").

Chinese accent, or foreign language accent in general, in speaking English, is actually easier to overcome when English has a syllable [note] completely non-existing in Chinese (or that foreign language). When there's a syllable that sounds like one in Chinese but does not exactly match it, the native Chinese student learning English will conveniently substitute the Chinese syllable for the English counterpart without being corrected. Short of an incentive to make this correction in his future career or life, the substitution becomes permanent or fossilized.

_____________
[note] It would be better to talk about the more "atomic" element, phoneme. But that may be slightly too technical to people that stumble across this blog.

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.