Off-topic: Travel to Chongqing

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"an amateur historian's cultural trip"

Some interesting comments extracted below:

While Confucianism brings family members extremely close to each other, and also friends to some extent, this religion or philosophy alienates strangers, i.e. people of no family or friend relationship, beyond indifference and sometimes to the extent of hostility.
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What puzzles me and people I ask everywhere is that these stunningly beautiful mountains and thousand-feet high cliffs never went into ancient painters' vision, even though famous poets in the Tang dynasty wrote about them. This can't be explained in the same way that Jiuzhaigou or Guilin of natural beauty no less than that of the three gorges was also not in ancient paintings, because the latter were either physically inaccessible in ancient times, or rarely stepped on due to occupation of a non-Han civilization.

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Not all feuds are created equal. Forty years after the Korean war, Chinese and American then pilots could meet and chat about their air fights as if they were playing a game. During the 1979 China-Vietnam war, soldiers reportedly exchanged canned food during the intermission of a battle or perhaps lunch time. But the two belligerents of the Sino-Japanese war would never come to terms in this life or the next, as if a threshold of human indignation was surpassed. 
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unlike Christianity or Islam, Buddhism does not exclude other religions, and the Chinese religions or doctrines care even less whether you worship another god or God privately or publicly

Requested to translate a poem

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> Hi there, a friend of mine gave me your email as a way to
> translate Chinese to English.  I have attached a picture.
> Can you help?



This is a poem. So my translation will be crude by the literary standard. It goes like this:

The eagle flies, the tiger roars, resonating in the river and mountains
Deep valley, sound of tide, a whole night's wind
High flying eagle, ferocious tiger, have great ambitions

by Zhang Baiyun
in early winter of year XX (maybe 1963?)

I'm not quite sure of the first of the two letters representing the year. If it's 癸, the year may be 1963 or any year matching the formula: 1963-60*n (i.e. 1963 minus 60 times n), where n is an integer. (Ref)

The three seals all bear the name of the calligrapher (possibly author too)

Normally, a poem should have four lines. I don't know why this Mr/Ms Zhang only had three.

Translation of a sentence in Classical Chinese

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> 一å�¥æ–‡è¨€，大家看怎么翻译å�ˆé€‚？
> “民困于贪残之政，故托言大鼠害己而去之也。”

This is a classical or literary Chinese sentence from "Interpretation of The Book of Songs"(《诗集传》) by Zhu Xi (Chu Hsi, 朱熹), who lived in the Song Dynasty more than 800 years ago. I hope the following translation is close:


The people suffer under the government of greed and cruelty. So the author allegorically talks about rats that cause harm to him and his attempts to get rid of them.

"最近" is not always "recently"

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I've seen too many Chinese use the word "recently" to translate "最近" incorrectly. Dict.org explains "recently" as "in the recent past" or "not long since". It clearly indicates the past tense, as in "I bought a car recently", "我最近买了一辆车". But "我最近准备买一辆车" should be "I'm going to/I'm planning to buy a car soon", not "...recently". This mistake is made presumably because the English textbooks in Chinese equate "最近" with "recently" without pointing out the tense it should be used in. Interestingly, the Chinese having immigrated to English-speaking countries subconsciously avoid using the word "最近" in future tense *in Chinese conversations*; they tend to use the word "很快" [literally "very quickly" but more appropriately "soon"], as in "我很快�买一辆车", which reflects the influence of language on thought.

Interjection (叹词)

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Interjections (å�¹è¯�) are another type of "虚è¯�" or empty words. At least one interjection seems to be common to many if not all languages, i.e., Ah （å•Š). Some are only slightly different in pronunciation among different languages, e.g. Chinese "哦" pronounced [o:] (IPA symbol) compared to English "Oh". Some are pronounced about the same but carry different meanings, such as Chinese "欸" which suggests slight surprise and confusion ("欸,他怎么å�ˆèµ°äº†?", "Huh, how come he left again?"), where "Huh" (or "Huh?" or "What?") is acceptable translation. But English "Eh" indicates hesitation in speech ("His name is, eh, John Smith, I think").

Some interjections are completely inscrutable without translation. The Chinese "å“Žå‘€", pronounced [aija] in IPA or "aiya" in pinyin accepting different tones, is uttered for a big surprise. Conversely, English "uh-huh", meaning "yes" or "no" depending on which syllable has the stress, is completely unintelligible to a Chinese with no knowledge of English. This fact may not be immediately appreciated by the speaker, causing confusion in a conversation. There's no problem if I say "uh-huh" to a Chinese having lived in the US for some time, in an all-Chinese conversation. I may be lightly laughed at but well understood if I say it to a Chinese that has learned English for some time. But if I say it to my parents who know no English at all, they assume I didn't catch the part of the conversation right before this point.

Thus, we see that interjections, unlike words of other classes, are special in that the speaker unconsciously uses one unique to a specific language in the environment this language is spoken, even when he converses in another language, often his mother tongue. An interjection is not conspicuous to his mind that it may be just as language-specific as most other words.

Proper name translation: semantic or phonetic

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In researching a subject in history of Chongqing, I came across various English translations of the name of a building, "白公馆" in Chinese, e.g. "Bai Mansion", "Baigong Guan", "Baigongguan", "White Residence", "White House".[note] The interesting part is the translation of "白". Should it be phonetically "Bai" or semantically "White"? The answer is, It depends on the origin of the name. According to
http://baike.baidu.com/view/138862.htm
this building was named after its owner Bai Ju (surname Bai). So the correct translation must be phonetic. "Bai Mansion" may be the best, although "Baigongguan" serves well as the name of a place. I don't suppose Mr. Bai, the owner, called it "白公馆" with intention of using a pun. But if he had done so, our translation would be impossible, or you pick one you like.

This reminds me of the translation of "Rice University", a reputable college in Texas. In the late 1980's, people in China referred to it as either "莱斯大学" or "稻米大学". But since the school was named after a person, as was known to all later, only the translation "莱斯大学" survived.

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[note] If you need to see who uses which term, use these keywords to search on Google (quotation marks matter; example for "Bai Mansion"):
"白公馆" "�庆" "bai mansion"
chongqing "bai mansion"
chungking "bai mansion"

虚词"很":empty word "very"

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The Chinese empty word (虚è¯�) "很" means "very". This translation is straightforward and universally accepted. But there's one little subtlety in its actual usage: "很" is used more often in Chinese than "very" in English. This causes some descriptions using an adjective in Chinese not really "very" much so (if everything is very good, nothing is really that good). For instance, "He's good", "He's good at playing cards" may be translated to "他很好", "他很会打牌"， although they can also be "ä»–ä¸�é”™", "他牌打得[很]好". The sentence "他很好" is not likely to be changed to "他好", which sounds odd, and "他很会打牌" may be misunderstood if shortened to "他会打牌" ("He knows how to play cards"). The apparently superfluous "很" serves no purpose other than making the sentence sound more native. But translators may not realize this and tend to literally translate "很" to "very". This practice seems to be particularly widespread among the translators living in China. I believe the correct way to deal with "很" is to review the context and ignore it if it does not really carry the meaning of "very".