Groping for words and phrases and coming up short has been a way of life for me for several months as I struggle with my very rudimentary Putonghua. But even if I were fluent in both Chinese and English, I'd still be struggling to explain, to translate so many things. It's a marvel, I suppose, that we can translate at all.
Some things may simply be untranslatable, as one of my seniors writes in her paper about A Dream of Red Mansions, one of the four Chinese "classics." A given Hanzi character (the written symbol, not character in the novel) might compress so many historical and cultural allusions into it, each of which are tethered to other values, assumptions, ways of knowing. Several students who are majoring in English but minoring in business write about the complexities of translating brand names and advertisements to preserve the humor, puns, parallelisms or whatever that made the original brand work and still be effective in the target language. As my language teacher told me last summer, Coco Cola means something like "tasty and rejoice!" But, according to http://www.troutmansanders.com/11-19-2008/ , Coco Cola had been translated literally when it first hit the market in the 1930s with something close to “bite the wax tadpole” or “female horse fastened with wax." Coco Cola had to work fast to come up with an an alternative translation for something whose characters happen to sound about right. . .Ke Kou Ke Le. I'm no expert, so don't quote me, but I heard that Pepsi's advertisement "brings you back to life" was first translated as "brings your ancestors back from the grave" years ago.
And so it was with mild awareness of these challenges that a Belgian, a (U.S.) American, and two Chinese friends and I sat down with our cups of green tea or red wine to watch the second half of a Chinese film set during the Japanese occupation, The Spring River Flows East. The film had subtitles--two sets, in fact--a yellow English set right on top of the black and white set of Chinese characters. The visual complexity of those yellow words that could barely be distinguished from the characters beneath them may actually say a lot about the challenges of cross-cultural communication.
I'm no film scholar, but Clay and my two Chinese friends happen to be, and I heard about Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell for the first time and their study of script writing manuals, among other things. Amazing to me was to discover that in the early days of Hollywood, script writers quite self-consciously fashioned their scripts so that scripts would appeal to foreign audiences--they wrote so that films could be exported. So, again, I was given pause to think about the relationships between and among language and culture and now BUSINESS. One of the alleged principles of writing-to-export films was developing distinctly individualized characters. That principle might seem obvious to Western fiction writers, but it's a principle that hasn't been widely shared by all cultures. Still, some of my students have commented that it's easier to identify with American film heroes because they are personalized, individualized, unlike the more abstract and symbolic hero of some Chinese films. While my student's comments don't surprise me, what does surprise me is that Hollywood has been self-consciously revising film scripts to reach distant audiences since back in the nineteen-teens. But what made any of the authors of those old script-writing manuals so sure that they knew what the principles are that would reach far across big oceans?
Much of our discussion rambled the way any Friday night discussion might, but it occasionally came back to film studies and this film with all its pointed use of moon imagery and references to a famous poem about having as much sorrow to bear as a spring river flowing east (you didn't have to be a scholar to make that connection--the film made it for us). Clay commented that so much of what he had read previously in Western film journals about this Chinese classic bears little resemblance to the articles he is finding now written by Chinese scholars.
All this led to a long discussion of critical theory--and just how controversial it is in China. Doesn't it get away from talking about the film (or the text)? And, besides, commented the younger Chinese scholar, Chinese priorities are different. Their film industry is just burgeoning now. Scholars not only of film but of everything else have a different kind of relationship and obligation to serve the whole society. So what gets said? All very interesting. From acts prior to translation--writing and performing the film--to translating it with subtitles--to reflecting on the film, there are so many times a person has to stop and choose, this word or that word, knowing that different words have different consequences. It makes my head spin.
And now I must go try to buy some fruit and vegetables. I'm still not sure if that thing that looks like a grapefruit but is ten times as big really is a grapefruit. And I know which cabbage is "Chinese cabbage," but there are so many, many greens. Which ones are spinach--and just what is spinach?
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