Posts Tagged "translation"

巧克力兮，花生酱
混合二味，皆更香
小圆形兮，超方便
咬后食尽，屑不见

Translation:

Chocolate -- oh, peanut butter
Combine the two and both taste better
Small round shape -- oh, super handy
No crumbs left from one-bite candy

After reading "A Gift from "Endlessly Stupid" to a New Hermit", Chris Stasse responded with a poem of his own, "Hermit Replies to Stupid" 《傻隐回复》.

鸟啼更静躺山夜

生人不约往孤野

车冷人寂思萦纡

离家一日似十月

Rough translation, 2020-11-21:

At night I lie in the mountains. It's quieter when birds sing

Strangers aren't likely to approach this lonely wilderness

My car is cold. I'm lonely. My thoughts twist around

One day away from home is like ten months

Naturally, I wanted to reply in kind. My goal was to show I had grokked Chris's poem by restating its sentiments in different words.

In addition, I challenged myself to work within the constraints of a line-internal rhyme scheme: the 2nd, 4th, and 7th (final) syllables of each line all share an ending sound.

秋风摇树果不应
愿隐士身旁同赏
人生弯曲预无因
他稳似果拟之值

Rough translation (updated 2020-10-13):

Autumn wind shakes the trees, but the fruits don't go along
I wish the hermit was here to appreciate it, too
Life's twists and turns aren't worth guessing at
He is steady, like the fruits, and that's worth imitating

桃红中坏烈焰
柳绿烧成灰柱
花落腾于热气
鸟啼出窝恐离

Translation:

Red peaches suffer from fierce flames
Green willows burn up into pillars of ash 
Flowers fall, then rise on heated gusts
Birds cry, leaving their nests in fear

Introduction

This page describes Linguary, an application to support two major activities in language analysis: (1) storing source material which has caught the user's interest, and (2) grouping and commenting on source material to attack or defend a hypothesis. This page, like Linguary, is a work in progress.

Linguary was born to serve my own needs in translation, linguistics, and recreational language learning, but I intend to make it useful for others (though there are no plans to make it applicable to non-Chinese languages.) The application was first mentioned on this site under the earlier name "Linguist's Working Environment," in my June letter to h0p3.

This is a translation of an image, seen on Twitter, about the current state of the Three Gorges Dam. I've done my best to preserve the news voice, and to ensure the accuracy of all technical terms related to flood control.

Translation

On July 18th, Xinhua News reported that, as a result of heavy rainfall, on the 17th the "second 2020 Yangtze flood" began in the upper reaches of the Yangtze.

Introduction

Paper Republic (PR) is a charitable organization which promotes Chinese literature in translation. PR's founder, a well-known translator named Eric Abrahamsen, doubles as the organization's sole technical staff member. He recently recruited me to assist with creating new platform functionality permitting PR website users to add to a database of Chinese literature. I'll provisionally refer to this new feature as "Book Lookup."

As currently designed, Book Lookup will ask the user to type in an ISBN. After being validated, the ISBN will be submitted to internal or external lookup services, through which Book Lookup can automatically populate the PR database with verified information.

After a few months of intermittent work, my translation of Lao She's short story "Iron Bull and Sick Duck" is ready to share. So far as I know, nobody has ever before translated this story into English.

Introduction

This is my translation of a social media narrative posted by someone living through the COVID-2019 outbreak in China. The original author is "Qian Wan" (a pseudonym.)

I originally translated this thinking it could become part of a group project, but logistical difficulties prevented them from using it, so I'm publishing it here. Anything I'm unsure of is marked like this.

Translation

This is an account of daily life in a rural county seat in Jiangxi Province, China, under the shadow of the COVID-2019 outbreak. No cases have been confirmed, but the popular sentiment is one of anxiety. It is in such moments that we most want to maintain empathy, for in the face of this crisis all people are feeling a shock to their spirits. No single element can exist separately from the whole.

I recently joined the unCoVer initiative [homepage / Facebook / Instagram], a group of volunteers translating Chinese accounts of ordinary people's experiences while living in areas affected by the nCoV-19 epidemic. I've done line editing, copy editing, and proofreading of translations, and may later be doing translations myself. If you're interested in a new perspective on this global event which is affecting so many lives, I urge you to read and subscribe to unCoVer's social media pages.

Two windows next to each other, one of which shows usage instances for the word under, or around, the cursor.

Part of the challenge of creating an interface to help with Chinese translation lies in defining the extent of a word. For example, when a verb and an object (e.g. 吃东西 ), is combined with a two-character complement (e.g. 起来), the result, 吃起东西来, does not contain "起来" as a substring, because two-character complements get split up to follow both verb and object. Any digital dictionary or reference system concerned with usage examples will have to account for this fact of Chinese grammar, and contain the knowledge that, despite the results of affixation, this can be considered an occurrence of the "起来" complement.

Introduction

This is my translation of 《铁牛和病鸭》, by Lao She. The (rough) first draft was finished on 2020-02-15. The second draft was finished on 2020-03-04. Many thanks to Chris Stasse for helping me take this from rough draft to final version.

I chose to translate this story for the challenge of rendering the sections which deal with Sick Duck's mental landscape. As far as I am aware, I am the first person to have translated this story into English. It is not listed in the table of contents for Blades of Grass, nor in the contents of Crescent Moon and Other Stories; nor does the Modern Chinese Literature and Culture resource center list this story in its bibliography of English translations of Lao She.

Below my translation of "Mr. Breeches," I've added a new section which discusses and criticizes another translation of the same short story.

While browsing the Web, I came across this blog post, which announced a new version of Google's cross-platform Flutter framework.

My attention was seized by the image at the top, because there were Chinese words on the presenter's slide! As a little exercise, I annotated the image with English translations of the Chinese terms.

[2020-05-03: The picture below may be broken. It's a known issue as I work to improve the site for better display on small screens.]

More translation-related material available here.

Introduction

As I watched a friend play the ninja videogame Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, I noticed an inscription on an enemy samurai's war banner. I wrote it down; now I'm translating it.

有死之荣，无生之辱

Source and Translation

A rough translation of just this phrase is:

Having the honor of death, not the shame of life

This quotation comes from the Wuzi, a Chinese military classic by Wu Qi, a Legalist philosopher who lived during the Warring States period. He was a military leader in Wei and, later, a politician in Chu.

The full quote, reproduced below, is a sentence which concludes the first passage of the section 论将 Lùnjiàng.

I've finished translating Mr. Breeches, a laugh-out-loud short story by Lao She. I hope you enjoy it.

Introduction

This is my translation of 《马裤先生》, by Lao She. The first draft was published on 2019-10-02. The second draft was published on 2019-10-04 (with thanks to Chris Stasse for some minor improvements.) Portions are marked if I'm still wrestling with them. I worked from the story as published in 《老舍小说集》 ("Collected Fiction of Lao She," ed. Fang Wei, China Society Press, 2004).

Translation

At Beijing Station, the train still had not set off. The man sharing my compartment, in the upper bunk, wore plain glass spectacles, a Western-style green satin shirt, and breeches. In his shirt pocket was a small writing brush; on his feet were dark woolen boots. The man asked, in a friendly manner, "Did you also board at Beijing?"

Material that I've translated from Chinese.

Larger:

• "Mr. Breeches" 《马裤先生》, by Lao She
• "Iron Bull and Sick Duck" 《铁牛和病鸭》, by Lao She
• An account of daily life in China during the nCoV-19 epidemic

Smaller:

• State of the Three Gorges Dam
• Translating a Slide from a Google Developer Conference
• Translating a War Banner from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

I've begun translations of more Lao She stories, including "Attachment" 《恋》, "A Family Letter" 《一封家信》, and "East and West" 《东西》.