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 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 Beijing-based 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 *** 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)
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This article is from Danwei.org
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 Piece of cake You may not be aware, but Chinese is one of the world's easiest languages to learn!
This news comes to us by way of China's foreign minister, Yang Jiechi (杨洁篪), who spoke at a press conference this morning.
Perhaps Yang was trying for a bit of levity in response to a question about relations between Russia and China. Here's how he closed his point on the need for expanded cultural exchanges (translated from the Chinese transcript):
There are many people studying Chinese now. I hope that all of you reporters, and the other ladies and gentlemen in attendance, can take up the study of Chinese. I believe that Chinese is one of the easiest languages in the world to learn. Otherwise, how can you explain why 1.3 bllion people have chosen it as their mother tongue?
That press conference also contained this gem of a question, which was mocked on Teng Yun's blog:
China Radio International: In recent years, China's foreign ministry has placed increased emphasis on economic diplomacy and public diplomacy. On the one hand, this assists Chinese enterprises in going abroad, while on the other, it invites common people to join the foreign ministry. How do you handle these two areas of work? What further plans do you have? Second, on the issue of individuality, we have seen you on the TV performing Suzhou ballad singing with other CPPCC members, leaving a deep impression on us all. Could you address for us some of your leisure-time activities? In addition, the media often describes you as refined yet farsighted, and humorous without sacrificing gravity. We want to know whether this is an outgrowth of your personality, or if it is a diplomatic character that has been formed over many years. What sort of diplomat do you see yourself to be? Thank you.
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This article is from Danwei.org
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Peter Micic writes about music, art and language for Danwei. He also operates a service that arranges visits to parts of the Forbidden City most people never see.
You can see his previous articles on Danwei here. In this new article, he recounts the history of two Chinese words that started as Qing dynasty actors slang and became buzzwords of the Chinese business elite.
Sea fearers and cave dwellers
Some years back I came across a cartoon. Government officials and individuals in China diving head first into an ocean of wealth hoping to strike it rich in the wake of economic reforms in the late 1970s. Some waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen their toes, or at most, wet their ankles. One guy sported a baseball cap clasping a fish (a homonym for wealth). Another had taken the plunge too far and was being attending to by a lifeguard. Others struggled to stay afloat. But all was not lost. One poor fellow with a bump on his head was taking notes from an artful businessman holding a book titled A Guide to Wading into the Sea.
The term xiahai (‘wading into the sea’) gained currency in the early 1980s in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s brand of economic pragmatism to refer to people from all walks of life who seized the opportunity to branch out into business and make extra sources of income. Another graphic term zouxue (‘to walk the caves’), referred to people in the entertainment industry who found opportunities to make extra money by performing.
Both terms have their origins in the Chinese theatre.
The term xiahai was theatrical jargon to refer to amateur opera performers turn professional. In the mid-nineteenth century, there was a significant increase in the training of non-professional actors and training schools. These amateur actors were called piaoyou (‘ticket friend’). During the Guangxu Period (1871-1908), two famous piaoyou guilds attracted many amateur actors, the Spring Sun Friendship Guild and the Emerald Peak Hut.
The piaoyou system was in principle opened to all non-professional actors, but in practice, it excluded those who did not have the income and connections to find the best teachers and instructors. An elaborate and highly formal ritual ceremony where a famous teacher accepted an amateur as an actor apprentice began his rite of passage into the professional work of the theatre. These non-professionals began their careers in training schools or clubs called piaofang, and their amateur performances became known as piaoxi. Acceptance into the professional world of the theater was known as xiahai or piaoyou xiahai (actor apprentice-***-professional’) FOOTNOTE [1]. Some of the most famous Peking opera actors who rose from the status of piaoyou to the top of their profession in the late Qing and early Republic include Zhang Erkui, Yan Jupeng, Zhu Qinxin, and the Manchu prince Hongdou Guanzhu.
The term zouxue was theatrical jargon among jianghu (‘rivers and lakes’), itinerant performers who wandered from place to place eking out a living, not unlike the jongleur entertainers in Europe during The Middle Ages. The term jianghu designated musicians (instrumentalists and vocalists) and other entertainers—street performers, singers, actors, storytellers, and dancers. This is how scholar John Minford describes the meaning of the word:
In the world of the street performers (our circus folk), people who have had to live by their wits, outsiders, sometimes hermits, nearly always elements considered disreputable by society...this brotherhood’ exist in defiance of the stifling convention and hypocrisy of Confucian society, it brings together men and women whose quest for freedom has driven them outside society. In this sense, the truck drivers I met in a roadside cafe in northeast China, for whom being on the road is freedom, inherit the age-old values of the jianghu world FOOTNOTE [2].
These peripatetic entertainers were also referred to as xue (‘caves’). The term not only suggests a temporary lodging for itinerant performers constantly on the move, but also a living pushed to the fringes or underground (i.e. ‘the cave’).
In its contemporary usage, zouxue is discursively defined as ‘a freelance performer who is sponsored by one or several work units, ’ ‘performers who join a troupe temporarily to give performances here and there,’ ‘a performer who performs outside of their work unit on the sly to earn an extra income, ’ ‘moonlighting,’ ‘seafearing,’ ‘professional performers, and even students, teachers and broadcasters.’ As the above examples illustrate, no two definitions are the same. A zouxuetuan was a group of performers or entertainers who toured the country. They were also called xuedui (‘cave brigades.’) One who managed and organized cultural events and negotiated contracts with records companies were called xuetou (‘head or leader of the cave.’)
So why ‘on the sly?’ In the early 1980s, there was initially considerable prejudice and resentment targeted at individuals who engaged in business. Within the entertainment industry, the degree of secrecy became part of the zouxue rhetoric. There were a number of reasons for this, among them, apprehension that once you started to earn another source of income, state paid jobs would be jeopardized, and the fear of paying income tax.
A kindergarten nurse-***-pop singer told a reporter in the late 1980s that how much she earned was a ‘secret,’ but after only three performances, she had made enough to buy a refrigerator, colour TV and washing machine. Her family could now frequent some of the best restaurants and hotels in Beijing.
While many took on part time jobs performing in bars, clubs, restaurants, joint-venture hotels, and public relations events, it was pop singers who could potentially make good money. In the late 1980s, the performance fees of pop and rock singers were widely publicized in the press. One report published in 1988 noted that well-known pop singers could earn between 800 to 2,000 yuan for one concert.
In September 1993, the composer He Luting criticized the fanatical craze for pop stars and their incomes, pointing out that Chinese society was now so swept by materialism that money measured the value of almost everything. ‘This trend is as deadly for the future of China’, he wrote, ‘as corruption and economic crimes.’ Other critics bewailed the increasing commercialization of the music industry where the music charts (paihangbang), were little more than ‘money charts’ (paiqianbang).
Other reports told of celebrities demanding exorbitant performance fees, and treating concert organizers with considerable arrogance and ill temper. In September 1996, the pop singer Wei Wei, who lost her job at the Central Song and Dance Ensemble the previous year because she had apparently failed to share the proceeds from two concerts, demanded an extra 40,000 yuan before a show in Hengdian, Zhejiang province. Concert organizers were also careful to handle stars with kid gloves, especially if payment was calculated according to each song for fear that they would ‘walk off the stage.’
As in market economies elsewhere, the system of stars in China was determined by whether they were profitable or not; the market expanding for certain musicians and disappearing for others. Two groups of pop singer emerged: the ‘idol school’ (ouxiangpai) and the ‘strength school’ (shilipai). The ‘idol school’ generally targets teeny boppers, churning out hits that are sometimes derisively called ‘saliva songs’ (koushuige) or bubblegum pop, and characterized by a quick turnover of singers succeeding each other in dizzing rapidity. ‘The ‘strength school,’ in contrast, is considered artistically ‘stronger’ and more ‘talented,‘ with a far longer obsolescent date then their idol school counterparts.
The pop star’s ascension in the reform period and the increasing commercialization and ‘packaging’ of pop singers for the mass market became the subject of one film directed by Huo Jianqi in 1996 called Singers (Geshou) A widely successful comedy skit shown on the Spring Festival Gala Evening (Chunjie lianhuanhui) in 1995 called ‘You Package It Like This,’ (Ruci Baozhuang) performed by Zhao Lirong, Gong Hanlin and Jin Zhu satirized the excessive need to package oneself—looks, speech, fashion, hairstyles—to get ahead in a consumer-oriented society.
Zouxue and xiahai have left behind a fascinating etymological vapour trail from their origins in the Chinese theatre to their use as graphic markers of making money in the 1980s.
Notes:
[1] In Yangzhou dialect the term guohai (lit: ‘cross the sea’) refers to storytellers who have made there debut on stage after completing their apprenticeship with a teacher. See ‘Storytellers Terms: A List of Yangzhou Storytellers’ Jargon and Technical Terms’ in Vibeke Børdahl The Oral Tradition of Yangzhou Storytelling, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Curzon Press, 1996:450.
[2] John Minford ‘The Deer and the Cauldron,’ East Asian History, Canberra: Australian National University, 1993, 9-10n24.
This article is from Danwei.org
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What's the best way to learn English in China? A short essay in this week's issue of China Newsweek evaluates some techniques.
Crazy English
by Shangshangqian / CN
English: it's not an issue if you know it, but if you don't, then it's like a stubborn disease, a *** in the heart or a thorn in the flesh that is imperceptible under normal circumstances. But in the uncertain atmosphere of professional advancement or job-hopping, English is definitely on the table. If you don't have a certificate you've got nothing. Forcing out a few sentences in an interview is more painful than constipation.
These days, if you don't have English, then you can't even move an inch ahead in your career. But how should you study English? English lectures are overcrowded, training classes are packed to the gills with students, and that colleague who can speak fluently is like a popular new actor, always surrounded by a clutch of people talking with him, hoping for an opportunity to test their skills. In certain contexts, English has practically become a national mission.
A friend of mine works as an editor at a fashion magazine. Her designs are always better than her colleagues, and she ascribes this to the fact that she's better with "ABCD" than "之乎者也." Even though this is something of a biased conclusion, I'm more inclined to accept it: it's never a mistake to improve your English. I've registered for English classes, but the results have unfortunately been minimal. When a group of people who don't know how to speak get together, they'll quickly gravitate to what's easy: they'll start to talk in Chinese.
When I watch American TV I make a point to avoid shows with outlandish situations, like Prison Break and Lost, because I don't think that I'm going to become a criminal or get lost on a deserted island. I once thought that if I listened to 300 episodes, even if I didn't make it to Hollywood I would still be able to "say" a few words of "hello" to foreigners in the Hollywood Café on the corner. Who knew that once I finished watching all ten seasons of Friends, six seasons of Sex in the City, and three seasons of Desperate Housewives, that I'd end up training myself to find pleasure in watching TV without sound.
A friend of mine revealed the secret of studying English: we've always treated English as a subject to be studied, or as a skill to be honed, but English is actually a tool for communication; you'll get astonishing results if you get emotionally involved
That is, at its heart, his idea was that we should all date foreigners. Through flirting and fighting, English will emerge from your mouth as natural as can be. But Cupid's arrows are blind: when my friend snuck into the cafeteria of the foreign languages university, he ended up on the arm of a Korean girl.
Actually, if you really want to excel in English, there's no need to pay the price of love. The most important thing, I believe, is to talk to someone who knows English. But where can such a person be found? English tutoring agencies provide this service—one-on-one training with a foreigner—but the price is an obstacle for the salaried class.
So someone had a fairly novel idea. These days, aren't lots of companies traveling an international road? If you call up an information hot-line, the first sentence you hear will be "Press one for English." So we'll press one for English dialogue and then practice English with the operator. And because "this call is being recorded," the operator can't ignore you; she'll have to answer your questions. So, under her patient guidance, you can gradually hone your vocabulary and pronunciation—even if your English is thick with a Shandong accent, or a Beijing tick, or Shanghai flavor, you ought to be able to conceive of yourself as a Yankee from California whose out to occupy some of that operator's precious youth....and if you've dialed an 800-number, you'll save the toll, too.
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This article is from Danwei.org
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Google's translation tools are used by increasing numbers of people to get the gist of news articles and other web pages written in foreign languages. But like most machine-generated language, Google's translations do not always make sense.
A Danwei reader sent in Google's translation for the English word "flippant". It comes out as "刺杀布什的凶手" or "the assassin who stabbed Bush" (see this screen shot).
Rather odd. But here's how Google explains the way their translations are produced:
[W]e feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. We've achieved very good results in research evaluations.
Google seems to have defined the Chinese translation of "flippant" by looking at a Guardian article by Charlie Booker that hinted that someone should assasinate George Bush. After a public outcry, the paper issued an apology that read, in part: "Although flippant and tasteless, his closing comments were intended as an ironic joke, not as a call to action..."
A Chinese summary of the affair includes the words 刺杀布什的凶手 in close proximity to the translation of the apology, so that, or something very similar, is probably responsible for Google's translation error.
Which poses a question: Is this a sad indicator of how seldom the word "flippant" is translated between English and Chinese?
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This article is from Danwei.org
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Danwei's competition to translate phrases (some of them dirty!) of Sichuan dialect into English and standard Mandarin is over.
Only one person got everything right: Alex Lopez. Congratulations! You will shortly receive an email telling you how to claim your bottle of Domain Ste. Michelle Brut, courtesy of ASC Fine Wines.
Bocaj got all the English translations correct and provided informative notes, but didn't provide translations into standard Chinese. We can't therefore give you a bottle of wine, but we will send you a color poster, courtesy of Plastered T-shirts.
You can see the Sichuan dialect colloquialisms here, with all the answers submitted in the comments section at the bottom.
Coincidentally, the Sichuan-born novelist Fan Wen, who now lives in Yunnan, made a interesting blog post about the Chongqing dialect yesterday. Here's an excerpt:
Regrettably, I've been away from Chongqing for many years, so I've forgotten much of the Chongqing dialect. What impressed me most deeply was that in the past, whenever people of Chongqing spoke it was always, "mother-fucker" this and that—really spicy stuff. Talking with people from Chongqing was like eating Chongqing hotpot. Here's a funny example: when two pretty Chongqing girls meet, their dialogue goes like this:
Girl A: I fucking asked you out for hotpot yesterday. How come you didn't show?
Girl B: I fucking had things to do at home yesterday.
Girl A: Fucking ***, that's all you ever do.
Girl B: Mother-fucker! Like you've never had anything you couldn't get away from.
You say their speech is uncivilized? Not the case. Are they angry at each other? Heh, it's just that you mother-fucking bastards don't understand the Chongqing dialect. It's just an imperative statement used as a verbal tick. Coming straight to the point in with the first sentence: "So what." People from Chongqing are kind of cocky like that.
Talking to people anywhere else, you'd find your face slapped as soon as the words "mother-fucker" came out of your mouth.
The rest of Fan Wen's post delves into usage and transcription of various terms in Sichuanese. This article is from Danwei.org
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