Always nice to see I’m not the only one struggling with idiomatic translations from Mandarin into what is ostensibly my native language. When translation pro Bruce Humes encountered ‘Wuhan is really not enough of a friend’ recently, he noted:

Chinese speakers will recognize this last sentence as a translation of a popular phrase (tho’ not always about Wuhan): 武汉真是不够朋友! Assuming I am right about the original Chinese, two questions: Does this quote read like “normal” English to you? How would you translate it?

In the interest of supporting direct answers to Bruce, I’ll leave comments closed here so that you can head over to Paper Republic to add your thoughts.

Today, March 4th (march forth!) is National Grammar Day in the United States. There are plenty of postings and sites dedicated to that for your googling pleasure, so I won’t burden you with more of the same, especially because this site doesn’t have much to do with the United States.

Last year I coincidentally spent National Grammar Day with Geoff Pullum, one of the world’s top grammarians.  We even talked a lot about grammar, but neither one of us knew that it was that day until the following day when I saw Arnold Zwicky’s post about it.

We don’t seem to have anything like a “national grammar day” in China, unfortunately, so I can’t write about that either. But grammar for me has become a wondrous thing.

And Chinese has grammar, despite what everyone says. Continue…

I’ve always liked the idea of semantic space at the intuitive level where human experience is a multi-dimensional topology filled with Venn diagrams on steroids. Each bubble (or blip or Mobius* strip or whatever) is a word, and very few words from language to language are exactly alike, which is to say in this topology that they do not have exactly the same shape. Often a bubble from one language doesn’t have a specific word in the next language and so a paraphrase is required.

In a lot of situations the lack of equivalence is trivial and uninteresting. But occasionally I’m struck by one that seems unexpected. The other week it was meliorative-pejorative. Today it’s coming out of some market research I’m doing for a publisher. We interview people about what books they buy, which inevitably leads to discussion about whether the books are the genuine article from the publisher or are knock-offs. Since we’re talking to students, it’s almost always the latter. But as I write up the report, I start to doubt my own English intuition. Sure, you can use genuine vs pirated, but it just doesn’t seem to quite fit as well as in Mandarin, which has the comfortable pair of opposites well-standardized in common usage:

• 正版 zhèngbǎn, meaning “genuine / legal”, character-for-character something like “true edition”
• 盗版 dàobǎn, meaning “pirated”, character-for-character something like “stolen edition” Continue…

When you want good Mandarin invective or Party-ish phrasology, you usually find bilingual dictionaries are not up to the task. They may give you “pawns” and “stooges” and so forth, but you need to read the stuff in context for it all to make sense.

That’s why I’m happy to have stumbled across (h/t Danwei) justrecently’s blog, where not only do you get translations of fun stuff — classic “bridge blogging” — but at least sometimes you also get the key Mandarin phrases from which the juiciest stuff is translated.

美国的狗腿子作崇 translated as
The lackeys who are worshipping America

中方已就美方上述决定向美方提出严正交涉 translated as
The Chinese side has issued solemn and just representations concerning the above-mentioned decision by the American side

I realize I could slog through the originals and find the phrases myself, but this is a huge timesaver and good, harmonious fun to boot.

Caution: while the neck-up pics are safe for work, the language really isn’t

In language, one generation’s mispronunciation becomes the next generation’s standard.

In the case of China, one generation’s mispronunciation, intentional or not, becomes the next generation’s mythical animal. A short history: Continue…

I’m in the process of typing out a book from the 1930s. Actually I’m in the process of typing from mostly legible copies of a book from the 1930s. I’ve had a few snags in being able to figure out the characters in part due to the bad quality of the copies and in part because I’ve only recently really begun to cram traditional characters into my head.

This isn’t quite the way to do it, I’d imagine.

Continue…

I have a Beijing business associate whose interests seem to lie squarely within the two dimensions of Chinese history and Mandarin wordplay, e.g. he gets excited about retelling 鸿门宴, he’s a cross-talk (相声) aficionado, and he writes Mandarin lyrics for his rock band friends. But he majored in English in college. Also, he teaches Mandarin to foreigners, part-time. Since the English thing didn’t jibe, I asked him why he does so much with a foreign language.

To improve my Chinese! Sometimes I think I didn’t really know Chinese until I tried learning English. Continue…

There’s got to be a new internet meme in here somewhere. From Donald Clarke’s Chinese Law Professor blog:

“Before closing the brothels, the Beijing municipal [Party] committee and municipal government did a great deal of investigation and research. Peng Zhen, who at the time was secretary of the municipal Party committee, personally led responsible comrades from the municipal Party committee and the municipal government to go deeply into the areas of south Beijing and the “Eight Major Hutongs” outside of Qian Men in order to understand the situation.” (在封闭妓院之前，北京市委市政府也做了大量的调查研究工作。时任中共北京市委书记彭真曾亲自率领市委市政府负责同志深入前门外“八大胡同”、南城一带了解情况。)

Emphasis is mine. The writers of the news article he quotes from apparently got to do their own archival research and came up with this photo.

I’d have to imagine that searching for a more modern snap would incur the wrath of Nanny.

I don’t plan on making a habit out of duplicating content here that’s also at the Annals of Wu. In fact I have a rule forbidding the practice. But this time I have to break that rule.

Growing Up With Shanghai is an audio project by recorded by Terence LLoren of Shanghai-based Bivouac Recording. As summed up on the title page, it’s “10 Shanghai soundwalks from young Shanghainese who were born and raised during the rapid growth of their city in the 80s and 90s.”

Here’s a little more from the About page:

“Growing Up With Shanghai” is a series of soundwalks with young Shanghainese who were born and raised during the rapid modernization of their city in the 1980s and 1990s. These recordings capture not only their most intimate memories of the locations where they grew up, but also the progress and growth Shanghai has undergone in the past 30 years. The current sounds of Shanghai can be heard behind the dialog and also serve as an audio document for future generations of Shanghainese. All dialogue is in Shanghainese or in their local dialect.

I’ve not yet gotten through all ten of the recordings but what I have heard are solid Shanghainese gold. Photographs by Weina Li accompany the recordings.

Head on over to growingupwithshanghai.com and check it out.

Wait — you haven’t heard of his ground-breaking research? With credit to Street-Smart Language Learning for the Fox News link and some fun analysis, along with a generous hat tip to MandarinMnemonics for linking to it with the best headline on this meme: “Michael Phelps, Rosetta Stoned?“, I’m pleased to introduce you to a side of Michael Phelps you probably have not been exposed to. Fast forward to 0:50 for the crux of the analysis. Continue…