Damn the translator!

No mention of bed-sheets

The attractive necklace at left is the title illustration from an article about fashion trends in this week’s issue of BQ lifestyle magazine (北京青年周刊). Major designers are putting out new styles in white this year to convey a sense of simplicity, grace, and spring-time, so the color white has a certain power in this year’s fashion marketplace.

The English title’s just there for show, really, so there’s not much point in getting upset about it.

A more serious translation scandal involved the poet Yi Sha, who was recently invited to a poetry festival in Rotterdam. The conference’s promotional materials included the line “Sha Yi edited a literary magazine named Not-Not, which played a central role in the lively, alternative poetry circuit outside Peking,” which seems to imply that Yi Sha was editor-in-chief of the magazine, when in fact he was merely on the editorial board.

Yi Sha

The misunderstanding (which only existed in the English copy; the Dutch text identified Yi Sha as one of a number of editors) inflamed the passions of online poetry fans who, as China’s netizens are wont to do, accused the poet of padding his resume and misrepresenting his position in China’s poetry scene.

After a bit of back-and-forth, including an investigation by The Beijing News and response from the organizers in Rotterdam that they invited “Yi Sha the poet, not Yi Sha the editor of Not-Not,” things were cleared up. A report in the Huashang News identified the likely root of the problem: a series of misinformed translators:

Yi Sha said that he once served as editor-in-chief of Literators (文友) magazine. As for Feifei (非非), the magazine that netizens were dubious about, he was on the editorial board in 1993, but editorial board members did not do any editing work. Feifei was a private communications and reference magazine for poetry, not an official publication, and the English name printed on the magazine was either Feifei or No-No, not Not-Not. Feifei editor Zhou Lunyou confirmed that Yi Sha had not done any editing for for the magazine.

“This is the result of the translation process, taking Chinese back to Chinese. I gave the festival committee materials that said I was editor-in-chief of Literators and a member of the Feifei editorial board; the translator put this into Dutch, and then that was translated into English. Netizens translated the English on the festival’s website back into Chinese,” Yi Sha said….he suspects that the Dutch translator misunderstood the distinction between an editor and the editorial board, leading to him being listed as an editor for Niet-Niet in the Dutch text, and subsequently editor-in-chief of Not-Not in the English text.

Yi Sha is something of a controversial figure in Chinese poetry, so it’s not really surprising that so many online commenters seized on this mistake. China Recitation (中国朗诵诗), which included Yi Sha on a list of the country’s top ten contemporary poets that appeared in its January launch issue, described his status:

Putting Yi Sha into the “top ten” will inevitably draw shouts of acclaim from many people and sniffs of contempt from others. I believe that this aptly demonstrates the delicacy of Yi Sha’s position on the contemporary poetry stage….Yi Sha has always maintained a high level of productivity, and while it may be a mixture of good and bad, with no shortage of trite works, this in no way detracts from his excellence. You can’t ask for everything a poet writes to be an earth-shaking work, unless he is a god. Recent Yi Sha works such as “Springtime Breast Plunder” (春天的乳房劫, 2006) and “Out-of-body Experience” (灵魂出窍, 2007) are sufficient to shut up his attackers.

At the other end of translation, cross-cultural blogger Zhai Hua put up a blog post today examining the wonderfully ideological example sentences in A Junior Chinese-English Dictionary (英汉小词典), compiled in the late 70s by the Commercial Press (the examples he gives are quite similar to those in the Chinese-English Dictionary published by Foreign Languages Press).

Zhai frames his post as a search for the “popular language” of the 70s, but the examples are not so much catch-phrases as reflections of the political flavor of the time. A taste:

command: to put proletarian politics in command (无产阶级政治挂帅)

distinguish: to distinguish between genuine and sham Marxism (识别真假马克思主义)

movement: the movement to criticize Lin and rectify the style of work (批林整风运动)

half: About half of the students are League members (将近一半的学生是团员)

no matter: She studies Chairman Mao’s works every day, no matter how busy. (不管多忙，她每天学习毛主席著作)

afford: We workers could never afford to send our children to school before liberation. (解放前我们工人根本没有钱送孩子上学)

such: We are proud that our country is forging ahead at such a speed. (祖国这样飞速前进，我们感到骄傲)

no: There is no unemployment in our country. (在我国没有失业)

intelligent: The working people are most intelligent. (工人阶级最聪明)

prestige: China’s international prestige is growing daily (中国的国际威望日益增长)

prevail: The East Wind prevails over the West Wind (东风压倒西风)