I was looking for some obscure vocab in Mandarin a couple hours ago, doing my best to manipulate Baidu searches to produce the desired results. What I eventually found was a nice little dictionary site, cibo.cn (词博网). It’s just one more site to add to the arsenal when it comes to quick-and-dirty translations. I put in 酿酒 (brewing, winemaking) as a test. Here’s the beginning of the output:

扩 Saccharomyces cerevisiae rasse sake 清酒酿酒酵母 【主科技词汇 】
扩 brewing machinery 酿酒机 【航海航天词汇 】
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To make sure my kids get a proper education in Chinese ideology here in China, we’ve been watching Kung Fu.  We’ve watched five episodes so far (plus the pilot), and my kids have noticed and become interested in the Chinese characters that occasionally flash by.  Usually they are too blurry to make out, or there are too few of them to get any meaning out of them.

In tonight’s episode, The Tide, Caine hooks up with a Chinese woman whose father is a famous poet who has been jailed by the emperor.  Caine finds a book of his poetry in the woman’s house, and impresses the woman with the fact that he is familiar with her father’s works, and can quote him readily.

At the end of the episode, when Caine sets off to a new town (as he usually does), the woman offers him the book of poetry as a gift.  He takes the book and starts walking away, then turns back for one last look, holding the book in his arm.  My younger kid shouted out “孙子兵法!”, to which I quickly replied “I don’t think so”.  We all looked carefully and then burst out laughing.

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In an earlier post, Long Time No See, we looked at how the English and Chinese conceptions of time are very similar.

From the observer’s point of view:

• The future 未来 (wèilái) is in front of us.

• The past 过去 (guòqù) is behind us.

The observer might be moving toward the future, or time and events might be moving toward the observer. The key here is that there is movement relative to the observer, from in front to behind.

But also, we project a front and a back onto time, or blocks of time.

• Earlier events are before 以前 (yǐqián) later events.

• Later events are after 以后 (yǐhòu) earlier events.

It seems that this is irrespective of the position of the observer. Events are positioned with respect to other events.

Each of these ideas is true for both English speakers and Chinese speakers.

But there’s one more element to everyday discussion of time, and it appears, at first glance, that English and Chinese speakers approach it in quite different ways. Continue…

Another item from the Sinoglot mailbag; again, undated.

Dear Auntie Sinoglot,

I feel quite lost in this strange culture and just don’t know where else to turn for help.

It’s all this punning superstition, you see. Continue…

For my very first Sinoglot post, I thought I’d ask a couple of questions.

Who is this advertisement aimed at? How do you know?

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George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have written at some length about metaphor and it’s role in language and the mind. The following quote is from their 1999 work, Philosophy in the Flesh (p139).

“Time is as basic a concept as we have. Yet time, in English, and in other languages is, for the most part, not conceptualised and talked about on its own terms. Very little of our understanding of time is purely temporal. Most of our understanding of time is a metaphorical version of understanding of motion in space.”

Note, “in other languages”. They don’t say, in all languages. But a theme of Lakoff and Johnson’s work is that, they claim, we think the way we think because of the way our bodies are. Continue…

I‘m was betting that this is just gibberish, but the fact that they didn’t use roman letters, or even a script that I recognize is quite remarkable.

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On using Google images for translation.

Tube foot? Maybe a fungus you acquire from spending too much time in front of the TV?

No, it’s one of these dangly things:

[photo credit]

Who’da known? Not me. But when your 9-yr-old daughter is working on her writing homework and wants to know the word for “those suction thingies that starfish have” your first move, naturally, is to go to Google images with that search term.

That’s what I did, and it wasn’t more than a few seconds before we got the right thing and the technical English term to boot. But then she reminded me:

“Daddy, so how do you say ‘tube foot’ in Chinese?” Continue…

On a recent trip to Sinoglot HQ, for my annual review, I was appalled to find the chairman sitting on a large sack of unopened mail. After brief negotiation, during which my past year’s productivity was called into question, it was agreed that I would work my way through the letters. The following item was undated and I’m not sure how to respond.

Dear Auntie Sinoglot,

I write in the hope that you can help me.

I’ve developed an irrational hatred of helicopters. Continue…