The sign for this restaurant is a visual pun. It says “five” in English and the character that is serving as the “E” says “five” in Chinese. Genius!
Category: We Love Translations
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The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
It’s as if Kafka decided to write a book with Carl Sagan, M.C. Escher, and Edwin Abbott Abbott (author of Flatland), and set it in China: You’ve got alienation, disillusionment, despair; satellite dishes listening for alien messages and actually receiving them; complex or impossible geometry, organisms passing from life to death and back again, meditative reflections and echoes of the self; and extrapolation that gratuitously passes beyond three dimensions… all of which is set against the backdrop of the bloody Cultural Revolution and conveyed in English that sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard.
I found it hard to enjoy The Three-Body Problem because I found the book badly written on a macro level as well as a micro level and because I dislike some of the themes. It was only interesting to read because it was really weird. Specifics but no spoilers below.
Sakura Cuisine’s Saliva Chicken
I posted a photo of this restaurant before because the name seemingly advertised so many kinds of food. They’ve simplified the name—presumably not because they saw my blog post, but who knows?
Now they are promoting a dish they call “Saliva Chicken”.
The Chinese name of the dish is three characters (that’s the traditional one for chicken, not the simplified one):
口水雞
mouth water chicken
Note that there is no sure-fire way to determine how many characters in Chinese correspond to a “word” in English. If you take the first two characters together, they mean “saliva”, because that’s what “mouth water” is.
口水
saliva
The restaurant seems to be offering a chicken dish cooked with saliva (?!), but actually it just wants you to order the chicken dish that makes you salivate. If they’d named it “mouth-watering chicken” in English, the name would have been perfectly unobjectionable.
In my opinion, the problem is not that the Chinese language is hard, or that English is hard, just that translation is hard. All languages assign meanings in arbitrary ways. Why, after all, should we English speakers think that “saliva chicken” sounds gross, but “mouth-watering chicken” sounds delicious? This distinction is not meaningful in Chinese, any more than the distinction between “cow meat” (eew) and “beef” (yum).
Ruth Chew books from Japan
Below are photos of the three Ruth Chew books translated into Japanese and published in Japan in 2016, which I just ordered by mail from Amazon.jp.
The Amazon Japan website is easy to use (there’s a button to switch the site to English), and you can check out with USD, but now I keep getting emails (marketing emails, presumably) from Amazon in Japanese!
See below for more photos of these exotic books.
Two More Little Princes
While I returned from Vietnam to Singapore, my husband went on to Bangkok. After seeing how pleased I was to find The Little Prince in Vietnamese, he wanted to surprise me by bringing back The Little Prince in Thai. I spoiled his plan by asking him to look for it when I checked in with him online during his stay. Then he felt it was incumbent upon him to come up with an even surprisier surprise.
The result: The Little Prince deluxe pop-up book! Since I had The Little Prince in English and six other languages (not counting Thai), clearly I needed to have the book in 3D.
It’s pretty spectacular! I was indeed surprised.
After a bit of Googling, I realized: nine versions is just a drop in the bucket. There are more than 250!
For comparison, the sensationally successful Harry Potter books are “only” available in about 70 different languages (someone’s got them all); I have copies in about 30 of them.
What about the The Bible? It’s available in over a thousand languages.
Still, The Little Prince is one of the most translated works ever. It’s up there with Pinocchio, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and stories by Andersen.
Given how many versions of The Little Prince there are, owning just one version for English (well, two, counting the pop-up) is paltry. I should figure out which English translation I have, because apparently there are several, and some are more well-regarded than others—or perhaps it would be fairer to say the different versions well-regarded for different reasons.
More on the subtleties and pitfalls of translation and publication across language barriers, with specific reference to The Little Prince, at the link below.
http://ephemeralpursuits.com/blog/2012/10/on-translation-and-the-little-prince/
Update: I’ve done a comparison of all 10 English translations of The Little Prince!
Vietnamese books
In Hanoi in stores and stalls selling Vietnamese books, there were a lot of familiar titles. See below for photos.
Six Little Princes
I’m fascinated by books that transmit knowledge and culture across language barriers, which is why I have whole shelves of familiar books in unfamiliar languages. (I’m not crazy; I’m erudite! At least that’s what I keep telling myself.)
One of the books I own in multiple languages is The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Above are copies in Lao(atian), Khmer (the language of Cambodia), Vietnamese, Portuguese, the original French, and Italian.
I bought the Lao and Khmer copies at Monument Books in Vientiane in 2015; I just recently bought the Vietnamese one at one of the three Artbook locations in Hanoi; I bought the Portuguese one in Porto, Portugal, in 2004. I unknowingly kicked off the habit of buying Le Petit Prince in other languages when I bought the Italian one in Italy in 2002. I probably bought the English version between 1999 and 2004.
The French copy is the one I used when I was a senior in high school. The book, designed for students, includes a glossary at the back, but I added footnotes.
Do I have an English translation of Le Petit Prince? Yes, but it’s not in the photo because it’s in a box with a bunch of other books we don’t have shelves for. There is more than one such box.
UPDATE: I have seven different English translations of The Little Prince and I have made a post comparing all 10 English translations!
…In Fact, It’s Our Specialty!
When I was a teacher, some of my students would bring to class bags displaying the name, logo, and endlessly amusing tagline of Tien Hsia Language School.
So finally I took a photo of the exterior wall of one of the Tien Hsia centers.
I think “Tien Hsia”, or 天下 (pinyin tiānxià), means “the world”.
Five-language construction site sign
This sign has five languages on it.
- English
- Malay
- Chinese
- ???
- Tamil
Lots of signs here have English, Malay, simplified Chinese and Tamil on them, since those are Singapore’s four official languages, but that fourth language is relatively unusual…
I’m pretty sure it’s Thai.
The Origins of Chinese Characters by Wang Hongyuan
Ever wondered what etymology is like in the Chinese language?
It’s like this.
So, is Chinese ‘pictographic’?
Well, does the ‘zhōng’ in ‘Zhōngguó’ (‘China’) look like part of a sundial? Because that’s what it is.
Drawing of a pole with some decorative streamers. The pole was placed in the center of a circle or dial so that a shadow cast by the sun on a calibrated dial could measure solar time—much like the gnomon or style of a sundial.
So yeah, ‘zhōng’ means ‘middle’ (as in ‘middle kingdom’), but it’s not because the line passes through the middle of the box. Rather, it’s because the whole stick thing (which has lost its notably asymmetrical streamers) is in the middle of a sundial.
I don’t know enough Chinese to benefit much from this book, but here and there I found something interesting, and the whole things reinforces the idea that the Chinese writing system is old, old, old. Examining how the characters evolved is like looking back in time. Reading the book made me feel like an archaeologist holding up a burning torch to peer at mysterious lines scrawled on the walls of a cave. The oldest characters embody the basic concepts of the society in which they were invented: food and shelter, war, birth and life and death…
When and Why I Read It
It was a gift to me from my husband’s parents years ago (sometime between 2003 and 2005). At the time, it was even more over my head than it is now, so it just sat there.
Frankly, I’m shocked that it’s still in print. It’s even got three reviews on Amazon. And since it’s selling at at a moderate price and a 15% discount, it’s not one of those print-on-demand inventory items.
Genre: Non-fiction (language, Chinese)
Date started / date finished: 22-Mar-16 to 11-May-16
Length: 200 pages
ISBN: 7800522431 (paperback)
Originally published in: 1993
Amazon link: The Origins of Chinese Characters
