Language Log

The bottle of body wash affixed to the wall of the shower in the Cheyenne hotel where I'm staying is labeled in French as "Savon Liquide pour le Corps".

English "body wash" is two words consisting of eight letters.  "Savon Liquide pour le Corps" is five words consisting of twenty-three letters.

We've discussed the phenomenon of French verbosity versus English brevity before.  See  "The genius and logic of French and English" 4/11/23) and "French vs. English" (8/2/15) — also about "soap".

Surely, I thought, the French do not have to be that loquacious just to say something so simple as "body wash".

[This is a guest post by Thomas Batchelor]

I was recently looking at a tourist bus around the Matsu Islands of Taiwan, and they have a timetable online with the route and locations for picking up passengers, as below.

[VHM:  Don't trouble yourself by trying to read the fine print of the schedule itself.  Just pay attention to the note about the pickup location at the bottom of the schedule, which is enlarged below the fold.]

First, a few words about the text, after which I will introduce the Sinologist who undertook this monumental philological task, Manfred W. Frühauf.

English:

The Mu Tianzi Zhuan, or Records of [King] Mu, the Son of Heaven, is con­sider­ed to be the ear­liest and longest ex­tant trav­e­logue in Chinese literature. It describes the jour­neys of King Mu (r. 976-922 BC or 956-918 BC) of the Zhou Dynasty (c.1046-256 BC) to the farthest corners of his realm and beyond in the 10th century BC. Harnessing his famous eight noble steeds he visits dis­tant clans and nations such as the Quanrong, Chiwu, and Jusou, exchanging gifts with all of them; he scales the awe-inspiring Kunlun mountains and meets with legendary Xiwangmu ("Queen Mother of the West"); he watches exotic animals, and he orders his men to mine huge quantities of precious jade for transport back to his cap­i­tal. The travelogue ends with a de­tailed account of the mourning ceremonies during the burial of a favorite lady of the king.

From IA:

By way of introduction to what you see below under the asterisks, regarding the (not-always) technical reasons for the paucity of webpages in Mongolian script, see some of the comments here, especially the one at the top (Greg Pringle).

I might mention that the president of Mongolia's webpage in Mongolian script — which he links to — only displays correctly for me in Chrome, not in Firefox and not on my iPhone (Safari).

"Not Lost In Translation: How Barbarian Books Laid the Foundation for Japan’s Industrial Revolution", by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution (July 22, 2024)

I am grateful to Alex Tabarrok and his colleague Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution University of George Mason University's Mercatus Center for introducing me to what is one of the most mind-boggling/blowing papers I have read in the last decade.

First, here is Tabarrok's introduction, and that will be followed by selections from the revolutionary paper to which I am referring.

Japan’s growth miracle after World War II is well known but that was Japan’s second miracle. The first was perhaps even more miraculous. At the end of the 19th century, under the Meiji Restoration, Japan transformed itself almost overnight from a peasant economy to an industrial powerhouse.

After centuries of resisting economic and social change, Japan transformed from a relatively poor, predominantly agricultural economy specialized in the exports of unprocessed, primary products to an economy specialized in the export of manufactures in under fifteen years.

There has long been a suspicion that the first Chinese translator of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928/1932), Ráo Shùyī 饒述一, about whom next to nothing is known, was actually the scholar and theoretician of aesthetics, Zhū Guāngqián 朱光潛 (1897-1986).

To give a little bit of background about the nature of the two translations of the novel, here is the abstract of a recent scholarly article comparing them:

This article discusses how sex-related content is rendered in two Chinese translations of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover: Rao Shuyi (1936) and Zhao Susu (2004). It is found that Rao's translation features explicitness, flexibility and Europeanization, while Zhao's translation features conservativeness and domestication. And the observed features in the two translations regarding sex-related content are explained from perspectives of social and historical background, translation purpose and intended readership, and patronage. Index Terms–Lady Chatterley's Lover, translation, sexuality

Zhu, Kun. "The Translation of Sex-related Content in Lady Chatterley's Lover in China." Theory and Practice in Language Studies, vol. 10, no. 8, Aug. 2020, pp. 933+. Gale Literature Resource Center.

"How Jane Austen’s Early Chinese Translators Were Stumped by the Oddities of 19th-Century British Cuisine:  How do you get a reader in 1930s China to understand what a mince pie is?" By Saihong Li and William Hope, The Conversation (9/15/22) / Get Pocket.

Jane Austen’s (1775-1817) works are globally renowned, but they were unknown in China until 1935 when two different translations of Pride and Prejudice were published. Today, her novels are increasingly popular and have been translated into Chinese many times – notably there have been 60 different retranslations of Pride and Prejudice.

Translators face the creative balancing act of remaining faithful to the source text while also ensuring that the translation is a smooth, informative read. One intriguing task for translators of Austen has been how to describe the 19th-century British food featured in the many convivial sequences that shed light on characters through their social interaction.

Google Translate adds Cantonese support, thanks to AI advancement:  “Cantonese has long been one of the most requested languages for Google Translate. Because Cantonese often overlaps with Mandarin in writing, it’s tricky to find data and train models,” Google said.  By Tom Grundy, Hong Kong Free Press (June 30, 2024).

The Google Translate app has been expanded to include Cantonese, thanks to generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) advancements.

In 2022, Google began using Zero-Shot Machine Translation to expand its pool of supported languages. The machine learning model learns to translate into another language without ever seeing an example, Google said in a Thursday blog post. Now it is using AI to expand the number of supported languages.

It added 110 new languages this week, in its largest-ever expansion, thanks to its PaLM 2 large language model.

"Mandarin Leaves a Manhattan Courtroom Lost in Translation:  Trial of Guo Wengui shows how linguistic issues can trip up China-related cases", by James T. Areddy, WSJ (6/18/24)

———

The New York trial of a Chinese businessman is Exhibit A for how language issues are gumming up federal prosecutions of Mandarin-speaking defendants.

Nearly everyone in the lower Manhattan courtroom appears frustrated by a halting process that requires translation of Chinese-language videos, documents and witness testimony.

It is one in a series of high-profile China-linked cases that are similarly getting lost in translation. Chinese-language evidence is piling up, unintelligible to attorneys. Translations are slow, and sometimes wrong. There is a limited pool of top-tier Mandarin court interpreters, and they can disagree on English translations. And for both sides in a trial, the work of interpreters provides ammunition for legal wrangling, from gamesmanship to courtroom objections and possible appeals.

When you hear the name "Nebraska", the first thing you think of is probably "corn" and "cornhuskers", at least that was what always passed through my mind.

No longer.  Now having come roughly halfway across this long (430 miles) state and finding myself in Central City, I have gained a keen (I would even say "palpable") sense that it means "flat river".  That's because, from one end to the other, I'm following Route 30 / Lincoln Highway, and it was easy for the surveyors who laid out the Lincoln Highway (our nation's first transcontinental road) to follow the Platte River.  You guessed it, which I also did long ago, that "platte" is French for "flat", and that decidedly is what this river is all about:  flat, flat, flat.

[This is a guest post by Martin Schwartz.]

"Unknown language #10" (12/1/17) left all stumped, including a broad range of superb scholars of many languages.  I have no Rosetta Stone for it, but have something that may be called a Russetta or Rusetta (as in ruse) Bone.

First, the mystery text, which was the focus of Language Log Unknown Language #10,  I reproduce it here as was transmitted there:

Ukhant karapet qulkt kirlerek
Iqat ighun chapuq sireleq,
Poghtu Paghytei Piereleq
Azlayn qoghular eliut karapet.

Now, to the above I give a set of verse found in Aleksandr Kuprin's Russian novel Jama ('The Pit'), 1909-1915:

U Karapeta est' bufet
Na bufete est' konfet,
Na konfete est' portret
Ètot samyj Karapet.

'Karapet has a buffet
On the buffet is a bonbon (vel sim.)
On the bonbon is a portrait,
It's the very same Karapet.'

[This is a guest post by Kirinputra]

To take a step or two back towards the Sad Cripples theme, I had the TV on the other day and the show host — echoing the guest, a dietitian — said this:

“Lán Tâi-oân lâng kóng ‘tāu-leng’; gōa-kok lâng kóng ‘tó͘⁺-nài.’”

(Can't remember if he used Tone 3 or Tone 5 on the last syllable.) This could also be written like this:

“Lán Tâi-oân lâng kóng ‘tāu-leng’; gōa-kok lâng kóng ‘豆奶’ (DÒUNǍI).”

= 咱台灣人講「豆乳」。外國人講『豆奶』（DÒUNǍI）。

Again, he wasn't making a point; he was just summarizing an offhand remark the guest had just made to the same effect. While he seems to be referring to Mandarin speakers as foreigners — and they are, in a meaningful sense — there is no way he meant that. Rather, he & the guest were ultimately both referring to the English word soy milk, but calqued into Mandarin as 豆奶 — also a word in Mandarin, but not generally used in Formosa.

[This is a guest post by Charles Belov.  To show what a dedicated, eclectic listener of Asian popular media Charles is, I've left his signature block intact.]

As a frequent, essentially monolingual consumer of Asian popular media, one of the issues for me has always been how translations succeed or fail at communicating both the particular Asian culture and how it can be expressed meaningfully in English. ¿Where does the translation reflect current or past Asian culture and where does it reflect American or British culture of the audience?

A term of concern for me at the moment is "cíxióngtóngtǐ 雌雄同體" (lit. "male female same body"), which Wiktionary translates as "hermaphrodite." However, Wiktionary also notes in the English entry for "hermaphrodite" that this term is now considered offensive and that "intersex" is the preferred term.