Fucking Stationery

John’s got some nice examples of local stationery products up in his latest post at Sinosplice.

Children’s notebooks are particularly good comedy value here, combining as they do bizarre Pokey the Penguin-type illustrations with excellent specimens of Chinglish translated and typeset by guerrilla Dadaists. (One of my six year-old students back in Harbin had a notebook that bore the legend “YOU WALKE DDOWN THE AlSLE WEARING NO THING BUTA SMILE AND LOOKED JUST LIKE AN ANGLE.” A ruler in the school supply store across the street bore the words “SATURDAY NIGHT JUICY FEVER.”)
The first picture John has up in his post is a capital example of this:

notebook01

Leaving aside the question of how the designers of the notebook heard about my nickname, I thought it might be fun to talk about how this sentence probably came into being, and how one gets from the strange-but-not-actually-offensive 土豆,你想干什么?(”Potato, what are you trying to do?”) to “Soil bean you want to fuck what?”

The boring part first: “soil bean” is just a character-for-character transliteration of 土豆, “potato.”

I’ve more or less gotten over Chinglish, I think — I’ve certainly generated more than my share of malaprop Chinese, and fair’s fair — but some things are just always funny, and one of those is the word 干.
干 has a range of meanings (partly since it now has to play the role of three separate characters), but the two most common are “dry” and “to do,” which have the two readings gān and gàn respectively. The fourth-tone reading, “to do,” can also mean “to screw,” and so it is not as uncommon as you might think to see supermarkets advertising “fuck goods” when they mean ‘dried goods,’ or better yet, gluepots promoting sex and drugs. An acquaintance once dissolved a roomful of people into helpless cackling with a bottle of shampoo that advised the user to “with towel, to lightly fuck the hair.” Two years later, it still makes me happy whenever I think of it.

Anyway, the problem word here is 干, but that doesn’t answer the question of why it is so commonly rendered inappropriately. I personally quite like the idea of some shadowy cabal of guerrilla mistranslators being responsible for the cavalcade of fucking in English signage and packaging here, but if I’m going to be honest with myself I suppose I have to admit that I don’t really believe this to be the case.

There are several competing theories. One, proposed by Victor Mair, is that the mistranslation arose from a misreading of the handwritten word “PUSH.” There’s a certain kind of baroque, Rube Goldberg-esque elegance to the theory, but it strikes me as extremely implausible. I got into the discussion over at Language Log with my own theory, which is that there is, somewhere, a machine-translation program that in some cases maps 干 to “fuck,” perhaps in cases where it’s trying to construct a sentence with a verb. I have no evidence for this at all — just the assumptions that:

(1) By now, everybody on the planet knows at least the words “fuck,” “OK,” and “Coca-Cola.”
and
(2) This is not a mistake that any human being would make, but it does seem to be the kind of weirdness that machine translation is so excellent at generating.

Another Language Log reader disagreed, positing instead that people are just looking at dictionaries of “colloquial English” and picking the first entry for 干 that they find, but I’m not convinced.

Anyway, back to the topic of stationery. I at one point had a great set of “HAPPY RAT” notebooks. There wasn’t much in the way of Chinglish (other than the standard “thls hlgh-qu altTy notebook will make you want to wrlte wlth lt a11 thetlm e”), but the covers featured drawings of the eponymous Happy Rat happily engaged in his ratty studies, and also running away (but still Happy) from poorly drawn objects that were either ghosts or unhappy amoebae. There wasn’t any fucking, but they were still excellent notebooks.

Update 12/10: See, I told you so.

Greetings from Shenzhen Airport

To: Jane, Patrick, Jane, Jon, Richard

Greetings from scenic Shenzhen Airport, where there is at least a Starbucks. This being Shenzhen, the area outside the airport is teeming with migrants offering various services and not taking ‘no’ for an answer. When Li and I got here a few days ago, we got a couple of young guys from Chongqing to drive us to the Shekou (’Snake-Mouth’) ferry pier for $12; this afternoon when we arrived back at Shekou from Macau, we got a local guy to drive us back to the airport for $10. Prices go up over the weekend, apparently.
I’d planned to meet up with a blogger friend at the Macau Venetian last night, but it didn’t quite work out. Li and I got there, and apparently Lonnie was there too, but the place was so huge and so crowded that we ended up wandering around for a few hours without finding him.

‘Huge’ and ‘crowded’ are awfully vague adjectives. Some background: Gambling used to be controlled by Stanley Ho, the local Bugsy Siegel analogue whose 2003 taxes accounted for 30% of the Macanese government’s revenue, but after Macau returned to the Motherland in 1999, things opened up to outside investment, and the old monopoly was completely broken in 2002. Las Vegas invaded more or less immediately and the area around the Hong Kong-Macau ferry terminal found itself infested with casinos — the Wynn, the Sands (the largest casino in the world, as measured by number of table games), and the MGM Grand, side by side with the now dowdy-looking old Casino Lisboa and other pre-handover casinos.

Things got crowded pretty quickly, and before long all new casinos were being planned for the Cotai Strip, a name on which the Sands corporation holds a US-registered trademark. There was a small delay while Cotai was created: the entire area is reclaimed land from the stretch of sea that used to lie between the two main islands of Macau, Coloane and Taipa, whence ‘Cotai’ gets its name. This made things nicer for developers, since the non-reclaimed land regions of Macau are for the most part fairly steep and hilly, what with being composed of rocks in the middle of the sea and all.

This gave them room to build the Venetian, which is the second-largest building in the world after Boeing’s factory in  Everett, Washington, which itself covers more area than Disneyland. Jumbo jets appear to be the standard measure of large buildings: the Venetian Macau can hold more than 90 747s, according to its own press materials, and has 1.2 million square feet of convention space, 1.6 million square feet of retail space — much of it located in ersatz replicas of Venetian plazas; St. Mark’s Square, up on the second floor, has Esprit, Nike, and Swarovski outlets — as well as 550,000 square feet of casino space downstairs, making it the largest casino in the world. There are 800 gambling tables, 3400 slot machines, and a 15,000 seat arena for entertainment and sporting events. Beyoncé is playing there in November.

This still doesn’t really describe the size of the place. It is like one of those nightmares where you keep walking and walking and walking and never get anywhere, or like a Doom level, or an optical illusion. It just goes on and on and on in every direction, and just when you think you’ve gotten to the end of it you see an escalator upstairs to the Piazza San Marco. Where you can buy Guess jeans, chocolates, and scotch at the duty-free stores. Walk to the end of that and take the escalator down and you’re back in the convention and hotel area, which combines the timeless beauty of Venice with the tackiness of Las Vegas and the overwhelming awfulness of an airport. Loop around back towards the casino floor and you pass a video wall showing a short piece about the making of the Venetian, with the statistics I quoted above flashing over time-lapse construction videos set to a pounding Jerry Bruckheimer soundtrack:

800 GAMBLING TABLES
3400 SLOT MACHINES.
THE ….
…. VENETIAN.

Back in the casino area it’s packed. Almost midnight on a Tuesday night and it’s packed. I don’t see a single empty table, and the aisles are full of people walking around, and the smaller performance area off to the side is chock full with a crowd watching some Cantonese cover group. Most of them seem to be from Hong Kong, but all of the signage is in the simplified characters used on the Mainland, and mainland high-rollers are loudly represented all around the casino, largely in the “high-stakes blackjack area,” whose name seems to have been calculated specifically to attract these guys, would-be big spenders who do their best impressions of Chow Yun-fat in The God of Gamblers, the squint, the grin, the flourishes with their gold Zippos.

After a couple of circuits of the place without any sign of the guy I was supposed to meet, Li and I called it quits and headed back through the casino towards the exit marked ‘bus depot.’ We passed a few more closed duty-free stores — their Phillippino employees were just pulling down the metal shutters as we walked past — and got to the restaurant area. I hadn’t had dinner, and so we ducked into McSorley’s Ale House, a kit pub plastered with Auld O’Irish knickknacks. I got a salad - it was only salads and deserts, the Philippino bartender informed me in almost perfectly unaccented English - and a pint of Tetley’s.

There’s a fun, very free translation of the Rubaiyat into Chinese that renders the verse
Oh, threats of Hell and hopes of Paradise –
One thing at least is certain — This life flies;
One thing is certain and the rest is Lies;
The flower that once has blown forever dies.
as
碧落黃泉皆妄語,    Bìluò Huángquán jiē wàngyǔ,
三生因果盡荒唐.    Sānshēng Yīn-Guǒ jìn huāngtáng.
濁醪以外無真理,     Zhuóláo yǐwài wú zhēnlǐ,
一謝花魂再不香.    Yī xiè, huāhún zài bù xiāng.

The third line, 濁醪以外無真理, is supposed to translate “One thing is certain and the rest is Lies,” but more literally means “Outside of Wine there is no Truth,” and this was what came to mind as I sat in the American-managed fake Irish pub there in the middle of the post-Portuguese Cantonese version of a Las Vegas interpretation of Venice, and thought to myself that at least the beer was real.

And now they are calling our flight.

–B

Postcard to my grandmother

Hi, Gran –

It’s National Day - the 58th anniversary of the day Mao Zedong proclaimed from the dais in front of the Forbidden City that the Chinese people had stood up - and I’m writing this on the midnight ferry between Hong Kong and Macau.

Both cities are bizarre hybrids, in China but not really of it — though legally it’s the other way around, which comes in handy when visa time rolls around. Macau is particularly weird: a Portuguese hillside town full of arcades and gallerias and shrines to figures not traditionally venerated as deities, like Monkey from Journey to the West, populated by Cantonese and the occasional post-colonial Portuguese. Both groups use languages that I can read but not speak; Mandarin and English will get you a ways in Macau, but not nearly as far as they will in Hong Kong, where English is absolutely everywhere — the city’s own post-colonial legacy. Beijing and Shanghai, of course, are anglicizing furiously, but you still can’t find an English-language bookstore worth a damn there. You have to go to Hong Kong for that.

So this evening Li and I went across to Hong Kong and loaded up on English books in the bookstores near the ferry terminal in Tsimshatsui, then got a nice expensive dinner at a Vietnamese fusion restaurant nearby. As we were finishing, a waitress told us (in Cantonese that Li deciphered only a couple of minutes afterwards) that a fireworks show was beginning, and so we stepped out onto the restaurant’s patio and watched the beginning of the National Day fireworks as they exploded over Victoria Harbor, the wind scattering the bursts so that they seemed to drift out to sea instead of just blooming in place the way proper fireworks ought.

We walked around for a while before going back to the terminal and getting on the ferry. Through the tinted windows the skyline twinkled in blocks and spires that shifted and parallaxed behind us as the boat pulled away, drifting lazily off like the fireworks, glimmering and glinting and finally fading until we could only infer the city behind us.

– B

HALP HALP O HALP

Dear all:

How can I cheer up my crazy, talented artist girlfriend?

Suggestions that are not “flowers” will be welcome. That is all.

searching-thought-earth-skin-virtue.

Via the chinese@kenyon.edu listserv, two articles in which American journalists write lazily about Chinese in ill-considered English. The issue at stake: whether or not Massachussetts should provide ballots on which candidates’ names are rendered phonetically into Chinese characters. (Everybody seems to agree that voting instructions, at least, should be provided in Chinese.)

First, excerpts. The AP says:

BOSTON - Chinese Americans complained Monday that Secretary of State William Galvin’s opposition to using Chinese phonetic translations of candidate names on election ballots ignores precedent elsewhere in the country, as well as similar translations every day in Chinese newspapers.
Galvin, who is the state’s chief election officer, complained last month that such translations are subject to interpretation and could result in “Mitt Romney,” the Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor, being read as “Sticky Rice” on the ballot.

Mitt Romney == Sticky Rice? That’s craaaaaazy! I wonder if anyone else will find that too hilarious not to repeat. USA Today?

Boston’s 2008 presidential primary ballot could read like a bad Chinese menu.

There might be “Sticky Rice” in column A, “Virtue Soup” in column B and, in column C, “Upset Stomach.”

Those could be choices facing some voters if the names of Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and Hillary Rodham Clinton were converted into Chinese characters, according to Massachusetts’ top election official. And that gives Secretary of State William Galvin heartburn.

On Tuesday, Galvin filed a challenge in federal court to a Justice Department agreement requiring that ballots be fully translated to protect the rights of Chinese-speaking voters.

Galvin says Chinese — which uses characters, not letters; has sounds with several meanings; and is spoken in several dialects — will create ballot chaos.

Those inscrutable Chinese, with their morphosyllabic writing system, and their dialects, and their menus with funny-sounding dishes! It’s almost as if their lack of a phonetic script has forced them to use clumsy alternatives!

Both the AP and the USA Today articles describe the Chinese versions of candidates’ names as “translations,” which is flat-out wrong. They are transliterations; that is, they are simple conversions of the sounds of the candidates’ names into a written form. There is no translation of “Fred” into Chinese, because it’s not a word, it’s a name. Ditto for “Thompson” (though I suppose maybe one could translate it by analysing it as “Tom’s Son” — but then you’re still stuck transliterating “Tom,” which is usually done as 汤姆 tangmu). When you get your girlfriend Jessica’s name tattooed on your arm in Chinese? You’re getting a transliteration, not a translation.

So then that raises the question of what symbols are being used for transliteration. I’ve written about this a couple of times before, albeit in the context of company and product names. There are already standard transliterations for most English personal names. Thompson and Romney might still have a chance at choosing transliterated names that they as non Chinese-speakers find more appealing, but Ms. Clinton is S.O.L.; people have been writing about her in Chinese for the past 15 years, and old habits die hard. Are the transliterations really that bad?

A cursory glance suggests not. Xinhua transliterates “Mitt Romney” as 米特·罗姆尼 Mǐtè·Luómǔní. (There may be a different transliteration used in news sources with primarily non Mandarin-speaking readerships.) Every single character used in that name is one used commonly for transliterating foreign words, so even a Chinese newspaper reader who had never heard of Romney would be able to tell at a glance that these five characters are not intended to be read as meaningful. (The dot in the middle, used to separate first and last names, provides a further clue.) But for the sake of argument, a literal translation of these characters would be rice - exceptional [archaic word for snare/common surname] - mother - [meaningless character used only for transliterations and the word for Buddhist nuns]. Show me one thinking person who can get ‘Sticky Rice’ (糯米 nuòmǐ) out of that and I will eat my copy of the 辞海 Cihai dictionary.

The same holds true for the other candidates — the stuff about “virtue soup” and “upset stomach” is pure fabrication based on cherry-picking one or two characters, discarding everything without potential humor value, and interpreting them in ways that no actual speaker of the language would. No Chinese person reading a name like 莎士比亚 would think that it meant “herb-scholar-compete-second-rate,” any more than an English speaker reading ‘Shakespeare’ would interpret it as a badly-spelled command to wave a pointy stick around.

Of course, the characters used in a transliteration can make a difference, and malicious transliterations aren’t unheard of. The uber-scholar Qian Zhongshu famously transliterated T.S. Eliot’s surname as 爱利恶德, which, unlike the candidate names above, does have a coherent meaning when read in Chinese — one that might fairly be interpreted as “Loves profit and despises virtue.” (The standard transliteration of his name is now 艾略特, a purely meaningless phonetic approximation.)
Then there are positive transliterations — like the US Korean War leaflets that encouraged Chinese soldiers who wanted to stop fighting but couldn’t bear the shame of crying 投降 *I surrender!” to instead shout out 爱责仁德 “love, duty, humanity, virtue!” — four perfectly admirable things that happen to be pronounced ài zé rén dé.

That said, Galvin’s objection, at least as quoted here — that transliterated names could lead to misunderstandings and “ballot chaos” (which incidentally sounds like the name of a really boring video game) — is simply untrue, and the journalists who wrote the articles linked to above are guilty of lazy thinking, bad journalism, and the same kind of ignorant exoticist bias that leads people to keep writing about how the Eskimos have two million words for snow.

I also think the Chinese Americans’ contention — that someone who has passed the US citizenship exam and is engaged enough to follow candidates will be somehow unable to resolve Xīlālǐ · Luódémǔ·Kèlíndùn to Hilary Rodham Clinton — is pretty dumb, though perhaps not impossible. After all, the briefest glance at the English-language China blogosphere will reveal people whose deep-seated political convictions remain unsullied by actual knowledge.

A plague on both their houses.

The title of this post? Well, I thought it would only be fair to “translate” (in USA Today’s parlance) my feelings on this whole thing: 搜思土皮德 Sōu Sītǔpídé.

more soon

Real life and the day job have been keeping me busy of late, but there’s some cool stuff coming up. Eric Abrahamsen, Cindy Carter and I have started up a new blog, Paper Republic, that aims to be a resource for Chinese literature and translation. The site is still somewhat in the process of getting off the ground, but we’ve all already posted a couple of translations, and there’s a database of contemporary authors and translators up there that should hopefully prove useful. There’s one very, very cool thing that’ll be going up there within the week, so add it to your RSS readers.

I haven’t had a lot of free time, but I did take a look through 墨子 Mozi today at lunch as part of my halfassed attempt to get my classical Chinese back up to speed.
Mozi was one of the great Warring States period thinkers. He came up with a number of innovations in optics, military strategy, philosophy of government, and logic that went basically unused for centuries. Needham says that Mozi actually anticipated Newton’s First Law of Motion; Hansen says that Mozi’s rhetorical innovations made philosophy possible in China. I posit that Mozi actually foresaw the George W. Bush presidency:

故雖有賢君,不愛無功之臣;雖有慈父,不愛無益之子。是故不勝其任而處其位,非此位之人也;不勝其爵而處其祿,非此祿之主也。良弓難張,然可以及高入深;良馬難乘,然可以任重致遠;良才難令,然可以致君見尊。
是故江河不惡小谷之滿己也,故能大。聖人者,事無辭也,物無違也,故能為天下器。
是故江河之水,非一水之源也。千鎰之裘,非一狐之白也。夫惡有同方取不取同而已者乎?蓋非兼王之道也。

Even the kindest ruler will not love a useless minister; even a doting father will not love a worthless son. One who occupies a position without being equal to his task is not the person for the position; an enfeoffed man who draws benefits without performing the duties expected of his rank does not deserve his fiefdom. A good bow is hard to draw, yet it can reach great heights and penetrate deeply; a good horse is hard to ride, yet it can bear great loads and traverse great distances. A talented man is hard to command, yet he can be trusted as an envoy to the ruler and an emissary to nobility.
In this way great rivers do not scorn streams and brooks as tributaries; therefore they become great. A great man does not scorn a task or neglect an errand; therefore he becomes a vessel for all under heaven.
Therefore a great river does not arise from a single source, and a fur overcoat worth a thousand yi does not come from the white pelt of a single fox. How then can one accept only those who agree with him and turn away those who disagree? This is not the way of a king who unifies.

Aw, snap.

missionaries

So John was in town with his folks over the weekend, and I had the pleasure of hanging out with him while his parents and wife visited the Forbidden City. John was quite understandably unenthused at the prospect of visiting the Forbidden City a third time. It may have been the seat of power for hundreds of years, but the imperial city now is a sadly diminished thing, flooded with hawkers, stalls selling instant noodles, and tour groups domestic and foreign. The city is laid out along a strict grid pattern, and after a while you get to feeling - in the words of Poagao - like you’re walking around a gigantic DOOM level. (The Forbidden City would make for an awesome game map, particularly when you consider that it was suppoedly designed to represent the five viscera of the god Nezha. But more on that, maybe, in another post.)

Anyway, so John bailed on that and we got coffee and bought pirated Playstation 2 games near my place. His wife’s family had arranged a private driver for their stay in Beijing over the weekend, so he called the driver to come pick him up. As we stood waiting on the corner of Jiaodaokou, a young couple approached us.
Shit, I thought. It’s going to be an ‘art student’ scam, or they’ll be touts for one of the godawful new bars near here, or something. I haven’t gotten harassed in years, and it has to happen now? Now John’ll never believe that Beijing is ten times the city Shanghai is!

The girl asked, in shy English, what we were doing. I replied, in English calculated to be polite without encouraging further conversation, that we were waiting for John’s friend’s car.
“Oh,” she said, and giggled nervously, looking over at her boyfriend.
“Um,” he said. “Where are you from?”
“The US,” I said. Jesus, English Corner flashback.
“Ah,” he said. “Are you…Christian?”
“No,” I said.
“Um. Ah — would — would you like to be?”
“No,” I said. “But thanks.”
“Ah,” he said. “God…bless you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Take care.”

And the two of them walked off down Andingmen Nei.

Worst. Missionaries. Ever.

Live Ink and Chinese Literacy

A long time ago I noticed that even though I’m much more comfortable with simplified characters than I am with complex-form characters, I find columnar Chinese to be much more comfortable to read than horizontally printed Chinese when it comes to avoiding eye strain, brain strain, and the problem of losing my place in a text.

So I was particularly interested to hear about Live Ink, a new system for parsing and formatting (English) text to maximize readability and retention. Apparently the word recognition studies that the company did showed that people tend to focus on a small group of words in any given line, with the preceing and following lines in peripheral vision, and that readers tended to focus on individual verbs or clauses. The system takes text and breaks it into smaller, more easily readable chunks, staggers them across the page, and (in some of the demos I’ve seen) colors verbs to set them apart further. There are some demos on the product site.

This strikes me as something that would be really helpful to me as a reader of Chinese - though I suppose the sentence parsing could be harder in Chinese than in English. (Though then again, the system seems mostly to be breaking things into smaller chunks, rather than identifying what function the individual chunks are serving.) Perhaps I should bug David to implement this in Adso.

Also, because I can’t resist, with apologies to e.e. cummings:

Walker Reading Technologies'
released
        what promises to
        break text into easilyreadable
                                  chunks
and stagger the lines onetwothreefourfive acrossthepage

                                                  Jesus

that's a cool idea
                      and what i want to know is
how do you like your new textformatting system
Mister Linguist

Why I’m not afraid of Google

Sure, Google may be beating up Yahoo and Microsoft and taking their lunch money, and it may be plagiarizing part of its Pinyin IME wordbank from Sogou, and it may be growing and spreading into every industry it can find — but I’m pretty sure that its machine translation systems aren’t going to be putting me out of a job any time soon, high BLEU scores or not. (Once the robot revolution comes, my parsing abilities will make me useful to our benevolent metallic overlords.)

Consider Google Translate’s rendition of the end of my latest Chinese-language blog post:

今天晚上在回家的路上,看到一位遛狗的老太婆边抖着缠在她腿上的狗链,边对身旁的小京巴儿骂骂咧咧:“你他妈好好儿走啊!你他妈不好好儿走我再也不带你出去!”

This evening on his way home, walk the dog to see a side Douzhao the old lady in her legs wrapped around the dog chain, Pin right side of the small Palestinian children Mamaleilei Beijing : “you damn thoroughly go ah you damn not properly take I do not take you away!”

Particularly precious to me: the rendering of 小京巴儿 (”small Pekingese [dog]“) as “small Palestinian children.” Also, the simply bizarre choices that the algorithm makes in its attempt to find matching passages — the interpretation of 边…边 (literally “side,” but a very common construction meaning “[doing something] while [doing something]“), for example, or the default to using pinyin for unfamiliar words.

Here’s what it should’ve said:

 On my way home this evening, I saw an old lady out walking her dog, which was winding its leash around her legs, and yelling at the little Peke at the same time: “Dammit, walk right! If you don’t walk right, I’m not going to take you out anymore!”

But to be honest, I prefer Google’s version, because a day without Dada is like fish ventricle capacitor.

OMG teh promised one!!!!1!

happycat has run out of happy :(

On my way to the subway this morning, I passed a guy sitting on the steps of the local branch of the Construction Bank with his head in his hands. He was a large - hell, a fat - Chinese gentleman, apparently middle-aged, with a shaved head and a long, flowing gown. He was just sitting there, holding his head, staring at the sidewalk in front of him. He glanced up when I walked by, and he looked so sad.

And I thought of cat macros like the one above.

I didn’t have my camera, but if I had, I would’ve taken a picture of the guy, and added the caption

THE MAITREYA BUDDHA
HAS RUN OUT OF HAPPY :(

Then in the afternoon I saw a guy on the subway who looked like a Chinese version of John Leguizamo.