|
Books
Translation and its discontentsPosted by Joel Martinsen, October 1, 2007 11:28 PM
![]() Translator and Fudan University professor Jiang Zhihui has been accused of rape. ESWN has the translation of a YWeekend story:
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. |
Partner Links
Jobs in China
Recent Comments
大门牙 on
Blockages
Joel Marti on
Chengdu bus fire blamed on 62-year-old suicidal gambler
vivian on
Bound feet in China
Sajid on
China first police blog
China Media Timeline
Major media events over the last three decades
Danwei Model Workers
![]() Recommended blogs and new media
Books on China
Foreign journalists in China, from the Opium Wars to Mao : Paul French, author of a book on Carl Crow has written a book about the lives and exploits of foreign journalists reporting from China from the 1820s to 1949.
Earnshaw Books' Tales of Old Peking: Tales from Old Peking is available from Earnshaw Books, and like its sister, Tales from Old Shanghai is a book of fragments of information about periods, events or places in Beijing's history, collaging together pictures and text about eunuchs, concubines, the Lama Temple, Opium Wars, art, emperors, and a miscellany of other interesting topics
Henry F. Pringle's "Bridge House Survivor": Pringle was imprisoned by Japanese forces from October 1942 to August 1945, and Bridge House Survivor, available from Earnshaw Books, is his harrowing account of torture under the Japanese.
Front Page of the Day
A different newspaper every weekday
From the Vault
Classic Danwei posts
+ A short interview with Muzi Mei (2004.02): Danwei interviews Muzi Mei + CCTV vs. classic movies (2006.03): A rundown of several pastiches of Chinese movies appearing online as 大史记 - "The Year That Was". Some from CCTV, others not. With links to video. + Street hawker cries of Beijing (2006.12): Yang Changhe demonstrates hawker's cries in a video shot by Muzimei.
Danwei Archives
Danwei Feeds
Via Feedsky
or Feedburner |






Comments on Translation and its discontents
Earlier this year, I was in a meeting with a group of English-Chinese translators, all of whom voiced concerns about the quality of recent literary translations into Chinese. One translator said he doesn't even bother to read translations from the eighties onward because they compare so poorly to earlier translations (from the twenties and thirties, for example).
The main culprits seem to be low translation wages and impossible deadlines set by local publishers. Nearly all of the Chinese translators in our meeting complained that they were unable to do justice to their translations in the time alloted by publishers. Books that should take between 4-6 months to properly translate and research are being completed in 1-2 months; this results in clunky and often unreadable translations that sell poorly and disappoint readers.
Although the field of Chinese-English translation suffers from some of the same problems (low wages, poor editing at small academic presses, etc.), foreign publisher deadlines are much more realistic. I spent 7 months translating Guo Xiaolu's 100,000-character novel Village of Stone. Howard Goldblatt spent one year on his painstaking translation of Jiang Rong's much longer novel Wolf Totem. It's hard to imagine a Chinese translator being allowed to spend 6 months, much less a year, translating an English, French, Russian or Japanese novel of similar length.
The situation is even worse in the world of film. Although Chinese viewers have access to an incredible variety of pirated films - from the latest Hollywood blockbusters to classics by Fellini, Tarkovsky, Almodovar and Kurosawa - the Chinese subtitles are so poor that they obscure the original meaning. It's not just that they are rendered into translationese or riddled with mistakes; sometimes the subtitles are made-up, re-scripted or cribbed from other films. When watching foreign films with Chinese friends, I realize that we are watching two entirely different films.
May I say that China is not just lost in transition, but also definitely lost in translation.
What an outrageous and misleading first line. The man has only been accused of bad translation. If I was the professor I would be consulting a lawyer.
No jo, he really has been accused of literal rape; Joel's only just translated the fact (accurately).
Most Chinese to English translation around the world is done by native Chinese. They do their best, but this breach of the cardinal rule of translation, work INTO your mother tongue, means that quality ranges from barely acceptable to flatly appalling, across the board, from the China Daily's laughable headline-writing to arcane chemical patents. As said, the Chinese working into English do their best, but there is a chronic shortage of native-English writers able to do this work and for those who do master the skill, which takes five-ten years, pay is a joke. As a result, the only non-Chinese who get into C>E translation are sinophiles working largely out of personal interest. Until the Chinese learn to (a) recognise and (b) appreciate good translation into English and its importance, this situation will go on and everything written in English coming out of China will make its originator look stupid and amateurish (click on almost any Chinese company's bilingual website).