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On June 9, 2012, Clement Larrive wrote:

I stumbled upon this sign while on a trip from Wuhan, Hubei to Shanghai.
Do you have any idea about what it really means ?

I apologize for letting this interesting query get lost in my bloated inbox for such an unconscionably long time, but am very happy that — by chance on this cold, rainy Saturday morning — I have luckily retrieved it.

So, what does the sign actually say?

rénlèi qǐyuán dì, zuì měi jīn jiàn shǐ 人类起源地，醉美金建始
(intentionally not parsing the second clause yet)

The first clause is easy and straightforward:  "The place of human origins" — I'll explain later where that's coming from.

The second clause on the sign is much harder to understand.

First of all, not everyone will know what to make of jian shi (lit., "establish beginning").

Secondly, all the machine translators that I checked render zuì Měijīn 醉美金 as "drunk dollars" or the like, and even many learned, literate native Chinese speakers initially misparse and read it that way.  It's sort of like having to do a double take when you read "New York Jets ship toilet rolls to UK", which we encountered earlier this morning, and not knowing immediately how to construe it.  Similarly, many literate Chinese readers, upon encountering the string of syllables zuì měi jīn jiàn shǐ 醉美金建始, will not immediately and automatically know how to break / link them up.  They might have to read the clause over a couple of times and think about it before realizing (if they ever do) that it should be zuìměi jīn Jiànshǐ 醉美金建始, and that it has nothing to do with zuì Měijīn jiànshǐ 醉美金建始 ("drunk US dollars establishing a beginning", or something like that).

Before we can understand what this clause is really saying, we have to overcome another stumbling block.  If jīn 金 has nothing to do with American dollars, what the devil is it doing there?  Jīn 金 has lots of different meanings, but the three main ones are "gold; money; metal".  In this case, it means "gold(en)", and it is meant to characterize jiànshǐ 建始, whatever that is.  Even if we didn't know that jiànshǐ 建始 is a place name when we started, sooner or later — if we're literate in Chinese — we'll figure out that it is something (most likely a place because of the overall context) that is being characterized as "golden".

I suppose that jīn Jiànshǐ 金建始 ("golden Jianshi") is modeled upon the idea of the Golden Triangle, which in Chinese would be Jīn sānjiǎo 金三角, to express the idea that Jianshi is a fertile and productive land — a laudatory name.

Once you get the jīn 金 ("gold") worked out, you can turn to zuì měi 醉美 ("drunk beauty").  If you have sufficient imagination and are clever enough with words, you might eventually be able to come up with "intoxicatingly beautiful"!  Thus the second clause means something like zuìměi jīn Jiànshǐ醉美金建始 ("intoxicatingly beautiful, glorious / grand / golden Jianshi").

This sign is a promotion for a place called Jianshi, a county in southwestern Hubei Province. Over half of its inhabitants belong to the indigenous, non-Sinitic Tujia / Bizika and Miao / Hmong ethnicities.

If you haven't already noticed, the sign is printed on the back of the protective cover that goes over the top of an airplane seat (you can see a small portion of the head of the passenger sitting in front).  It is an advertisement put out by the Jianshi county tourist bureau, capitalizing upon the claim that modern humans originated in that area (see here and here) (psst! — I don't believe it for a minute).

Incidentally, the name of the county is an old favorite for reign periods of rulers dating back two millennia.  It means "Establish Beginning(s)".

Oh, one other thing before closing.   I love what they've done with the stylized JS 建始 at the top.  The square seal form in red at the top left of the vertically stacked characters is a very nice touch, but I particularly like the ruby Pinyin at the bottom right of the characters, also in red.  That made my day — just lovely!

[Thanks to Rebecca Shuang Fu and Fangyi Cheng]

October 3, 2015 @ 10:44 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and advertising, Lost in translation, Parsing

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