Translator and Fudan University professor Jiang Zhihui has been accused of rape. ESWN has the translation of a YWeekend story:
Fudan University associate professor Jiang Zhihui translates at the rapid rate of two books per year and is labeled as the “wild man of translation” “who has a book in which there are 55 mistakes in the first 10 pages.” Many netizens questioned how such ‘academic books’ can ever be published? Do the publishing houses have a good system to screen and evaluate and is anyone ever held accountable?
In recent years, the quality of translations in China has dropped across the board. Why is that? Can the publishing industry cope with this hard problem? The reporter found out that most of the translations of scholastic works in mainland China operate in the ‘fast food” model and therefore it was inevitable that the readers are dissatisfied.
The netizen Yuxiong wrote a post titled “Jiang Zhihui: The Chinese translation who ‘raped Arendt’s “The Life of Mind”‘” which was widely disseminated. This post lists fifty-five errors of Jiang’s translation of “The Life of Mind: Thinking”) (Jiangsu Education Publishing) in just the first ten pages alone. The post accused Jiang Zhihui of “not translating Arendt, but raping her instead.”
Poor-quality translation is hardly the only problem plaguing China’s bottom-line-driven publishing industry, but it’s certainly one of the more entertaining. Nitpicking vocabulary and sentence structure is something anyone can do, and some people have even found ways of making it pay.
Zhu Naichang, for example, translated E. M. Forster’s classic work of criticism, The Aspects of the Novel. Zhu’s book, an English-Chinese facing-page version, works as a case study of translation as well as an introduction to the art of fiction writing. It’s actually five translations in one—Zhu provides extensive footnotes in which he highlights the less-than-perfect renderings of earlier translators and explains why his version is better.
This seems like an appropriate post for a mention of the group blog TransNator (翻疫終結者), which is devoted to outright mistakes in Chinese translations—mistakes that can nearly always be chalked up to the translator misunderstanding the original text (basically what Jiang Zhihui is accused of doing). Try this great post from August for starters—it picks apart the 1999 Chinese translation of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
In other translation news, Paper Republic notes that yesterday, 30 September, was International Translation Day, which had the theme “Don’t Shoot the Messenger” this year.
Does that include translators like Jiang Zhihui who’ve already committed rape against original works? Or, as those TransNators suggest in a wonderful rant against stilted translationese, maybe we readers should all just kill ourselves first.