#on translation

hardwareabstractionlayer:

findrahil:

my biggest problem with writing nif fanfic is that i can’t decide how to translate 先生. technically it means “mister,” or “sir,” but mister sounds too modern and ordinary, whereas “sir su” sounds weird, because he’s not a knight. he is chief of jiangzuo alliance though, so that may work.

Strong personal feelings ahead, take with a grain of salt.

I hated Sir Su for 苏先生 the first time I saw it, but then I saw Master Su/Su-xiansheng and hated those even more (I have never seen Mister Su, probably because everyone finds it weird). I’m very used to Sir now.

Master Su doesn’t work for me because 先生 does not mean a master of people, and I strongly dislike introducing that implication to something without it. Sir, on the other hand, is a common title of respect to a man, and doesn’t imply knighthood to me. A waiter at a fancy restaurant might address someone Sir the same way they would call one 先生.

As for why I don’t like -xiansheng, well, that’s a more personal reason. In general, I hate seeing pinyin without context. Whenever I encounter pinyin, there’s a primal fear that sparks in my brain from the slow trauma of years of forgetting Mandarin. I instinctively think oh no, I won’t be able to parse this. And without tone marks, I don’t even know how to pronounce it. When an English news article describes some recently coined term in China only in pinyin, I stare at it for minutes trying to puzzle out the characters and fail; when I see a Chinese name written only in letters, I think about how awkwardly I would say it when I meet that person. Pinyin sits in this uncanny valley that I can’t cross. 

Obviously, I know what -xiansheng means, but every pinyin phrase pricks me with discomfort when I run across them. So I err on the side of not leaving pinyin in translations, but there are definitely cases where it’s right to use. To ramble on a bit more, I see the purpose of pinyin usage in translation as threefold:

One, to indicate how something is pronounced in Mandarin. For people’s names, sure, makes perfect sense in a typical context, despite the failure of pinyin without tone marks to convey full pronunciation like I already complained above.

But anything beyond that, I think about it. Place names, for example, are often very descriptive in Chinese because we don’t generally name places after people or use loan words for places. Yellow River 黄河, East Sea 东海—why is it superior to translate the sound? What does a non-Chinese speaker gain from reading Huang He and Donghai? They learn how the place name is kind of pronounced in Mandarin (I say kind of, because the average non-Chinese speaker likely doesn’t know actual pinyin pronunciation), when they could have learned something about how Chinese people think of the place. To bring NiF into this, why translate 红袖招 as Hongxiu House/Court when Red Sleeve is so evocative? There’s a piece of information lost there, and the gain, in my mind, is far less.

This brings me to the second reason:

Two, because there’s no easy equivalent in English. For a simple example, units. It makes sense to keep cun 寸, chi 尺, and so on instead of converting to inches, feet, and so on. First of all, because the Chinese people in the Chinese world are not thinking in inches. And second of all, more important to me, it takes the reader (i.e. me in this fictional scenario) aback to see something un-Chinese. The reader might start to wonder, do Chinese people use inches? Was the original written in inches? Or was it in a Chinese unit that you converted?

There’s nothing wrong with something giving the reader pause. That’s what all footnotes essentially do, and I love footnoting. But a footnote pause delivers information, whereas confused pauses like this distract from the flow of the work with no gain. To further avoid distracting from the flow, I sometimes translate units to natural terms, like handspan, instead of something like chi if it’s a moment where I don’t want the reader to pause and learn facts.

-lang 郎 is an example of a title I keep in translation, because there’s no equivalent in English to me. I’ve seen it as Sir or Master, but it’s so far from either of those two (not to mention there already are terms that map to Sir/Master) that I think it should be kept in pinyin. And -lang is just so pretty even in letters, whereas -xiansheng looks like a…pinyin blob to me. I think Sir is sufficiently close to 先生 that the ease of access overrides the difference in meaning.

But wait, you might be saying. This is such a narrow-minded view. What about:

Three, to normalize pinyin words in the global consciousness. So many Japanese words have entered the English-speaking lexicon even though people didn’t have to learn kawaii when cute already exists! I should be doing my part to spread Chinese culture and normalize xiansheng, like sensei has been!

A compelling argument, for sure. It all goes back to the purpose of translation. How much of it is to simply present the work to someone who otherwise cannot experience it, and how much of it is to relay a different way of life and thinking? Should translations be comfortable or challenging? Am I excessively catering to my desire to make things easier for the imaginary reader in my head when real readers may, in fact, want to learn more about the other culture and would benefit from it? And how much of these considerations differ when applied to a scholarly translation of Tang Dynasty poetry versus PWP Jingsu smut (as an aside, the two aren’t actually that different in my eyes because well, there’s a lot of poetry in Chinese fanfiction)? There’s been so much good writing on this subject that you could be reading instead of this post, so I’ll just stop here.

This reason definitely weakens the objection in reason one. Non-Chinese speakers can fit both Donghai and its meaning in their head, as they’ve done with many loanwords. They may even be incentivized to learn Mandarin with more exposure to pinyin, which is a good thing!

Positives aside, I think it’s also important to note that many speakers of a Chinese language don’t speak Mandarin, and they either use a different romanization system or pinyin doesn’t represent their dialect accurately, so pinyin isn’t the be-all and end-all solution. But I think this argument isn’t quite as strong when the original work is by a Mandarin speaker, and this post is already long enough.

TL;DR I use Sir for 先生 in my writing because of my own cursed relationship with pinyin, but I understand and appreciate those using -xiansheng!

Resident pinyin hater back to repent my ways, a little.

There’s another thing pinyin does that I didn’t give it credit for:

Four, to abstract a concept when it would be abstracted for a native speaker.

I didn’t realize this until I had to translate a bunch of palace names. Let’s take Yǎngjū Hall/养居殿 from NiF and look at all the meanings a native speaker might associate with the name:

• The literal meaning: 养 = cultivate + 居 = residence. It can be read as verb + noun, as in cultivating your place in the world, or simply noun + noun, cultivation and residence. Maybe you’d translate the full place name to something like Hall of Cultivating Residence, though it’s rather clunky.
• The historical reference: this name likely derived from 养心殿, literally Cultivating Heart Hall, official translation Hall of Mental Cultivation, and the real palace hall many Qing Dynasty emperors lived in the Forbidden City. This reference suggests that the verb + noun parsing is more likely to be correct.
• The hilarious meme: a lot of NiF viewers find 养居 funny because 居 is modern slang for pig (deriving from pig/zhū/猪 being pronounced like jū in some dialects), so now the name is Pigsty Hall, and the in the sty is, of course, the emperor.
• The dirty quasi-pun: yángjù (note the different tones) is yang implement/阳具, or the male member.
• The figurative allusion: this name is also quite possibly a reference to Mencius’s saying 居移气，养移体, meaning your residence transforms your bearing, and your cultivation transforms your constitution, or that our living environment and daily habits have a huge influence on ourselves. This would suggest the noun + noun parsing is more correct. It’s a subtle allusion to Xiao Xuan having lost himself on the throne, his place of power and residence corrupting him into a mistrustful and brutal man (great insight from [x]). Names with hidden meanings and allusions like this are extremely common in Chinese.

Of course, most of these meanings are not being perceived when someone thinks of this name. The brain only holds so much information at a time, and it’s very good at abstracting concepts, or else our mental circuits would explode every time we use language, if we constantly think of every single possible definition and association of every word we use.

To me, the most important thing in terms of how the name is perceived is that 养居 isn’t an already commonly known phrase. And so a fluent speaker, upon encountering the phrase for the first time, would likely first try to parse the literal meaning, then probably think about the hilarious pigpen meaning, if they’re online enough. The rest of the associations are probably not as often thought of, unless you’re a big fan of the Qing Dynasty/penis euphemisms/Mencius, especially the last one, which is a big leap. After the initial mental mapping and after Yangju Hall has been mentioned enough times, the name becomes an abstracted blob in a Chinese speaker’s head with a sound and series of characters associated with the practical meaning, the place where the emperor lives. That’s why I don’t think using the pinyin name is the cheap easy way out here, because Yangju Hall is arguably closer than Hall of Cultivating Residence to how a fluent speaker would perceive it once they’re used to the word.

In practice, for translations not restricted by word length (i.e. not subtitles), I like introducing an important pinyin name along with its associated surface-level meaning once, footnoting the other meanings and associations, and then using only the pinyin afterwards. So in this case, something like “…Yangju Hall [1], the Hall of Cultivating Residence, …”

This all ties in with my second point in the previous post: there really may be no easy equivalent in English for a name like this, when there are so many meanings, and none are strong. So I can think of a few things you risk by localizing names like this, even when you do it “correctly” by translating the literal meaning:

• Elevating the literal meaning above all else is not how Chinese—a language that has always been heavily implicit, where what’s unsaid is as valuable as said—works at all. The literal meaning can even be the least important, because it’s only a mask for the real meaning. But using the hidden meaning doesn’t seem quite right either: it rather defeats the purpose of, well, being hidden.
• Along those lines, sometimes the author intentionally chooses an ambiguous name for effect. To explicitly choose a meaning in translation is to deny the author’s agency.
• Look at the official names of places in the Forbidden City: Gate of Divine Prowess/神武门, Gate of Loyal Obedience/顺贞门, Palace of Heavenly Purity/乾清宫…To non-Chinese speakers who lack the cultural background of how things are named in Chinese, it can seem that these imperial names are rather silly and dystopian-sounding, whereas in a language like English, the meaning of most place names is not immediately obvious. This is not such a big problem in ancient fanfiction translations, but very much an issue when translating press releases from the Chinese government, for example, when the difference in the literal and perceived severity and tenor of expressions often leads to translations that sound a lot more evil empire-esque than how a native speaker would think of the original (which is probably done on purpose, at least some of the time).

Does that mean I would keep all place names in pinyin? Definitely not! Consistency is overrated, especially when compared to clarity and accuracy, and when there are so many inconsistencies inherent in any language. There are plenty of place names where the strongest association for a native speaker is the surface-level meaning, and that’s where I think the literal translation is better, especially the one character place names that aren’t particularly valuable to normalize in the global consciousness (point three in the last post), like Tiger Hill for 虎丘 (the fictional NiF place and not the real Huqiu in Suzhou). I think this strikes a good balance between flattening every name with a single meaning and acting as if every single name is too abstruse and profound to be captured in another language. Of course, plenty of names fall in a gray area, and making these decisions is what the translator’s job is.

Anyways, that’s how much I can change my mind after six months. Ask me again in another six.

At the start of this year, I decided to translate a Chinese Nirvana in Fire fanfic to English, which apparently led to a debilitating addiction. Some seven months and 250k+ words translated later, here are some thoughts from someone who decided to just go for it instead of learning any translation theory beforehand.

Translations are often described as a delicate balancing act between faithfulness, clarity, and elegance. Personally, I like to replicate the holistic experience of the reader in a new language as much as possible, plus give tidbits about Chinese language/culture (usually in the footnotes) when it’s not distracting to the emotional arc at hand. In the spirit of not learning any theory, I’m skipping all the framework laying one should probably do at the beginning and going straight to some of my favorite case studies.

Faithfulness: Preserving the aura of expressions

InChief’s Getting Married (Ch. 9), a regional official is described as a 芝麻绿豆官, or a sesame seed and mung bean official, an expression meaning he’s insignificant. We don’t have that in English, but we do have a similar small food that also means insignificant: peanuts. Because peanuts is an informal expression and may be unfamiliar to some readers, I translated it to a lowly official worth peanuts so that even if the reader doesn’t know about peanuts, they don’t have to go look it up to get the point (somewhat ironically, it’s the alternative meanings of common words that often trip readers up more than uncommon words, because if you look up an uncommon word you’ll get the dictionary definition, but if you look up peanuts you probably get…the nuts themselves or the comic strip, neither of which are helpful here).

Translating idioms and expressions are a huge part of translating Chinese because Chinese people really, really love their expressions. You can certainly translate them directly, and I do that both with footnotes and sometimes without, when the meaning is clear. But this comes at a cost to clarity, because when a common expression in Chinese becomes an unfamiliar one in English, the experience of the reader is changed from getting a nice splash of color in the prose to stumbling over a strange turn of phrase, which honestly isn’t all that faithful if you’re interested in preserving the flow of the narrative. That’s why I really like translating a expression in Chinese into an equally common expression in English while keeping something of the character of the expression.

For another example, in the same story (Ch.5), Xiao Jingyan says that Sir Su made him 一见倾心, which the dictionary might say love at first sight. At first sight for 一见 is spot-on, but 倾心, literally tilted heart, conveys that striking kinetic energy of your heart turning upside down or pouring out when you see something incredibly lovely, so I wanted something with more oomph.

Fell in love is a common expression and has the physical element, though I find it a bit too common, such that I don’t even think about the physical part as I read it; lost his heart sticks closer to the heart part of 倾心 rather than the physicality of the action; heart skips a beat orheart gave a lurch are also good, but they’re a bit ephemeral compared to Jingyan’s heart lying there sideways, gurgling. So I translated it to fell head over heels, which has that topsy-turvy funny feeling of love I’m looking for. Chinese uses heart-related expressions a lot more than English, on average, so I don’t think much is lost by removing one heart.

Speaking of love, I try to avoid using love unless the original text specifies 爱 (as another aside, 爱 has somewhat different connotations in ancient times compared to now, but often the author will use it in modern register despite the ancient setting, so you have to distinguish that). There are so many ways to express love in Chinese that I try to do it creatively in English as well. See this key dialog in The Plum Blossom Trials (Ch. 20):

“这样的线，应该绑在真君钟情的人身上才是。”
“你怎么知道我没绑在我心仪的人身上呢？”

You can translate both 钟情 and 心仪 as love:

“This kind of thread should be tied on the person Immortal Majesty loves.”
“How do you know I didn’t tie it on someone I love?”

But the result is so flat and obscures the fact that they didn’t use the same love.

心仪 is usually in the dictionary as admire, but in English, the verb form of admire doesn’t really make sense as a counterpoint to love, because the platonic meaning of admire comes first for me (perhaps a subject to ramble on for another day). So I went with the more literal meaning of possessing the heart:

“This kind of thread should be tied on the person Immortal Majesty loves.”
“How do you know I didn’t tie it on someone who has my heart?”

And I did end up using love for 钟情 instead of a synonym, because one of the loves is already changed to a roundabout expression here, and two different fancy wordings would be overdoing it.

Clarity: Serving word salads judiciously

Continuing the idea of faithfulness not being entirely about the literal meaning, I often think of clarity as its partner, instead of an enemy. Consider this part of a sentence from Entering the Curtains (co-translated with @tofufei, Ch. 2):

文武双全、惊才绝艳的林少帅，霁月清风、温润如玉的梅宗主，“扑通”一声摔倒在地

In mostly literal English:

The Young Marshal Lin outstanding at both literary and martial pursuits, with unrivaled talent that astounds, the Chief Mei like a clear moon and fresh breeze (meaning peaceful and beautiful), mild and gentle like jade, fell on the ground with a plop

This is obviously extremely long and unwieldy. Because Chinese is so concise number-of-characters-wise (though the overall amount of information is the same, of course—one can think of it as packing much of the entropy into the characters themselves instead of long combinations of low-entropy letters of an alphabet), short descriptions in Chinese easily turn into long adjective phrases in English, or what I refer to as a word salad. 

Let’s think about why this was written like this. The point of these descriptors is to set up the contrast between the two identities and how unexpected it is for either Lin Shu or Mei Changsu to fall on the ground with a plop. Because those four character phrases are both well-known and relatively shorter in Chinese, a Chinese reader would likely not spend much time reading them in proportion to the rest of the sentence as an English reader would digesting that unfamiliar word salad. To spill a bunch of descriptors might be more faithful on paper, but not in terms of how the reader actually perceives the sentence. So to preserve the rhythm and balance of the sentence, we went with:

The Young Marshal Lin prodigiously adept with both sword and ink brush, the Chief Mei elegant as a fine breeze on the full moon, fell on the ground with a loud plop

I’d argue that this is more faithful and clearer than the literal version, in both cadence and amount of imagery in the reader’s head. Note that the jade reference is taken out in the interest of establishing a parallel between the two Lin Shu and Mei Changsu descriptions: Lin Shu = sword + brush, Mei Changsu = breeze + moon. I don’t usually omit a chunk of meaning like this, but there are truly a vast number of jade comparisons in this fic and believe me, we’re not missing this one.

The exact composition of a word salad depends heavily on context, of course—the same words in different contexts will often be translated differently. Consider this from Chief’s Getting Married (Ch. 5):

我的苏先生，我那温柔清雅、仙姿玉质的苏先生……

Again, the usual superlatives for Mei Changsu. Here Emperor Jingyan is tossing out all the wonderful things about the person he fell head over heels with at first sight, and the effect is meant to be a bit ridiculous. So I dumped it all out without commas like a lovesick person would rattle off a monologue in their head:

My Sir Su, my ethereal gentle elegant divine Sir Su…

I could have gone with immortal-esqueand jade-like for 仙姿 and 玉质, but I didn’t want to disrupt the flow of common adjectives with clunky hyphenated ones.

Elegance: Using new meaning to convey the original meaning

Infuck, is my history circle really trending??!! (aka the forum fic), Mei Changsu, a renowned writer in an alternate history China where Nirvana in Fire actually happened, writes a letter to Xiao Jingyan in Classical Chinese inviting him to a date private flower viewing party:

红梅类卿，相与观否？

In modern Chinese, this would be:

红梅像你，一起看吗？

And in English:

Red plum blossoms are like you. Want to see them together?

But this fails to convey the literary Classical Chinese feel and the implicit meanings of Mei Changsu being 1) a very good writer 2) a very good writer who flirts using his brush.

Comparing your beloved to something immediately reminded me of “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18. And so I ended up translating it to:

Shall I compare thee to a plum blossom? Shall we view them together?

This works for me on multiple levels:

• Implying that Mei Changsu is a good writer who has a fancy way of flirting, whether the reader knows it’s a Shakespeare reference or just likes the way it’s worded (but if the reader doesn’t, then, oh well).
• The “Shall…? Shall…?” sentence structure mirrors how the original is two phrases of four characters each. I didn’t overdo it by equalling syllables/meter, because the original phrases are not that similar besides the length. I dropped red to make the sentence simpler; it’s also made obvious later that the plum blossoms are red.
• Mapping 卿 to thee: both are archaic and intimate forms of you (I almost always translate 卿 to thou/thee when it’s used this way).
• Sonnet 18 was also written by a man and addressed to a man, and some cite it as evidence of Shakespeare being bisexual. It’s a cute allusion tucked inside this metafiction of present-day netizens trying to figure out if Mei Changsu and Xiao Jingyan were gay for each other from their writing (among other things).

No translation is perfect, of course. A potential downside is that readers might get distracted into thinking about Shakespeare and wondering whether the original is a Shakespearean reference (it is not). But hopefully readers come away with what I’m trying to convey: in the world of this fic, Mei Changsu is as good, as famous, and as romantic a writer as the Bard.