Language Log

Latest article in SupChina:

"‘Small-town test taker’ — phrase of the week"

A “small-town test taker” is a self-deprecating — or slightly insulting — phrase to describe a country bumpkin who works their butt off in pursuit of success.

Andrew Methven (7/22/22)

One would not expect a strongly class consciousness and behavior in a presumably classless communist society, but that seems to be the case in the PRC, especially in the entertainment sector, of all places.

Our phrase of the week is: small-town test taker (小镇做题家 xiǎo zhèn zuò tí jiā).

Context

Chinese pop singer Jackson Yee (易烊千玺 Yì Yángqiānxǐ) and two other celebrities are facing controversy after the National Theatre of China (国家话剧院 guójiā dà jùyuàn) hired them as staff performers, sparking calls on social media for more transparency amid concerns that they gained privileged access.

New York Times book review by Sophie Pinkham (6/21/22):

The Thorny Politics of Translating a Belarusian Novel

How did the translators of “Alindarka’s Children,” by Alhierd Bacharevic, preserve the power dynamics between the book’s original languages?

A prickly dilemma for a translator if ever there were one.  Faced with a novel that is written in more than one language, how does one convey to the reader the existence and essence of those multiple languages?  Because of the linguistic intricacies posed by the original novel and the complicated solutions to them devised by the translators, which are described in considerable detail and critically assessed by Pinkham, I will quote lengthy passages from the review (which may not be readily available to many Language Log readers), focusing almost entirely on language and translation issues.

Every bilingual country is bilingual in its own way. The principal languages in Belarus, which was part of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union, and which remains in Russia’s grip, are Russian and Belarusian. Russian is the language of power, cities and empire; Belarusian is the language of the countryside, the home, the nation. In neighboring Ukraine, whose history in some ways resembles that of Belarus, Ukrainian is now the primary language. Belarusian, meanwhile, is classified by UNESCO as “vulnerable.”

Translators of novels written for bilingual readers thus face a daunting challenge: how to transplant a text clinging fast to its country of origin while preserving the threads of history and power between its original languages.

From Mark Swofford, a cup of bubble tea with Taiwanese on it (romanized, Hanzified, and translated).

Xiaowan Cai received this picture from a friend of hers who is on exchange from Oxford University at Kyoto University.  Everything in all four languages on the sign looks pretty normal, except that there is a not easily detectable, extraordinary gaffe — or ingenious tour de force — in the Chinese.

Martin Delson sent in this interesting puzzler:

I'm participating in an international virtual book-club where all participants are bilingual in German and English. For some reason, the book that the group chose to read is Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
 
Wikipedia tells me the Japanese title is "Konbini ningen (コンビニ人間)".
 
A pair of sentences, not far into the book, reads as follows in the English translation
 
"The first at the cash register was the same little old lady who had been the first through the door. I stood at the till, mentally running through the manual as she put her basket containing a choux crème, a sandwich, and several rice balls down on the counter."

[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce]

[VHM:  watch as much or as little of this 24-minute video as you wish; the most pertinent portion runs from 2:17 to 3:40]

Quotation is at 1:43 / 2:59; article below the break.

"Google Translate learns 24 new languages"
Isaac Caswell, Google blog (5/11/22)

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To make sense of the story that follows, one must understand that the Korean word "agassi 아가씨" used to refer to a young lady from the upper class, but now in North Korea means “slave of feudal society” and has a very negative connotation there.

"Hidden meaning of Korean term 'agassi' leads to murder", by Choi Jae-hee, The Korea Herald (5/3/22)

Because the linguistic psychology that lies behind the tragic crime recounted in this article is intricate and subtle, it is necessary to recount it at some length:

An error in a mobile translation application recently prompted a 35-year-old Chinese man in Jeongeup, North Jeolla Province, to murder a Korean resident.

I am a fan of capital letters.  They let us know when a noun is a proper noun — the name of a person, a place.  But I also have to admit that they are something of a bane at times.  For example, I grew up learning that one should capitalize all terms in a title except for prepositions, words of three letters or less, definite and indefinite articles, and so forth.  For many publications, however, including here at Language Log, it seems to be house style not to capitalize all the terms of a title over three words in length, unless they are proper nouns.

This indefiniteness about whether or not to use capitals in titles gives me lots of headaches.  Because I'm a stickler for bibliographical exactitude, when I'm preparing my list of references and footnotes, it causes me much grief to decide whether to include capitals or not when different sources threat them dissimilarly.

[This is a guest post by Jenny Chu]

It came up today when I was reading this somewhat viral post on Facebook. 

Yesterday, in "Malign Woodpeckers and Other Hegemonic Behavior" (4/18/22), we became briefly acquainted with "The Great Translation Movement" (TGTM).  Today we will probe more deeply into what it is all about.  Suffice it for the moment to say that TGTM deeply unnerves the CCP.  In addition to "Twisted in translation: Western media, social groups set up language barriers by intentionally misreading, misinterpreting Chinese materials", by Huang Lanlan and Lin Xiaoyi, Global Times (4/14/22), which was the main basis for yesterday's Language Log post and in which TGTM played a key role, TGTM was also featured in these recent Global Times (GT) articles:

"How China can counter translation bias", by Tang Jingtai, GT (4/12/22)

"GT Investigates: Behind the online translation campaign are a few Chinese-speaking badfaith actors fed by antagonistic Western media", by GT staff reporters, GT (3/24/22)

Here's a Global Times article in Chinese against TGTM where we learn that the Chinese name for it is "Dà fānyì yùndòng 大翻译运动" ("The Great Translation Movement").

With this stunning journalistic masterpiece, Global Times, China's official, nationalistic, daily tabloid newspaper under the CCP, has outdone itself in exposure of truly insidious "Western" (U.S., British) linguistic behavior:

"Twisted in translation: Western media, social groups set up language barriers by intentionally misreading, misinterpreting Chinese materials", by Huang Lanlan and Lin Xiaoyi, GT (4/14/22)

Here's one gem from the article:

Professor Tang from Fudan University noted that anti-Chinese forces are now mature enough to use the internet to self-organize – actively plan anti-Chinese issues to infiltrate and mobilize some netizens, driving them to act like woodpeckers to find a few rare, extreme statements and then embellish them.

Gosh!  Who knew that woodpeckers could be trained to do that?  Every day is an education.