Well, one of those technical reasons is that "confucius" is unambiguously a single word, notionally a name, but it definitely is not "the Latin form of his name" -- in Chinese the name is 孔 kong and 夫子 fuzi is an honorific title. "Confucius" is a very weird choice to 'translate' that; you'd expect something more like "Con sapiens".
Note that Confucius is also frequently referred to as 孔子, and -- classically -- just plain 子.
Well... you're being very sloppy in your terminology. It's hard to justify calling "Confucius" "the Latin form of his name", because that's not what it is. Rather, "Confucius" is two other things: (1) it is a Latinized transcription of 孔夫子; (2) it is the name by which he is generally known in Latin. But it can't be the Latin form of his name, because it is the Latin form of 孔夫子 and 孔夫子 is not his name.
Similarly, the founder of Alibaba is known as "Jack Ma" in English and his name is 马云 mǎ yún, but we don't go around saying that "Jack" is "the English form of yún". That would be a very strange position to take.
> Different time period, but Roman writers were bigger on transliteration of names than translation - there are at least two modern books trying to reconstruct Celtic names from the phonetic Latin renditions in Caesar's works, for instance
I was under the impression that Megas Alexandros was known to the Romans as Alexander Magnus.
Given the best sellers written by presidents which are memoirs, autobiographies, and variations on self-help books, absolutely "Jason Shea Thought" would be a runner, except it would need a snappier, snazzier name for the American market.
Something like "Be The Change You Hope To Make Great Again"?
I obtained the Moss Roberts translation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms because, from what I could find on the internet, it's supposed to be an excellent translation.
But I was hugely disappointed to read in the preface "The characters are referred to by many names. For the convenience of the reader, we always use a single name for each character." [my paraphrase]
I want to know all the epithets. If you want to make it convenient for the reader to know who the text is talking about, print the epithet and footnote the name of the character it identifies. :(
I read the first chapter shortly after it came out because someone linked it on Facebook, then saw there was only one chapter up and forgot about it for several years. Then I became a fan of SlateStarCodex independently and read it for years without realizing that his book Unsong was that cool kabbala-themed story I had read one chapter of back in the day. Then I figured it out and still waited a couple years to get around to trying it. Then I enjoyed it immensely.
Yes, it's by Scott and it's Scott basically writing an alternative history. So if you liked this you'd love unsong. I didn't realize it was so good until a few months ago.
There are a few chapters about the alternate fantasy history of the US which cover US presidents. They're a lot more humourous than any sort of serious alt history but might be the vibe you're interested in. I for one enjoyed them a lot.
Before I got to the punch line, I'd been wondering if this was an alternative history about some obscure relative of William Shea, a prominent and politically influential mid-20th century lawyer most notable in hindsight for his role in brokering the deals for MLB to approve the first round of expansion teams. Shea Stadium, the long time home field for the New York Mets, was named after him.
This was fun. I seem to remember getting confused swimming through all the Chinese names in Three-Body Problem. Perhaps those anime distributors who aggressively Americanized names (Usagi->Serena, Naru->Molly for Sailor Moon iirc) had a good point!
Yeah, I think a lot of people don't give translation enough as an genuine art form where there aren't really "correct answers".
If you're trying to preserve the culture and context of the original work, then probably should leave names mostly untouched, but if you're trying to make characters that are memorable to a foreign audience, changing them may be a useful choice.
Chinese is particularly bad here - Japanese at least has pretty straightforward phonetics, as far as an English-speaking audience is concerned, but the tonal nature of Chinese and it's abundance of non-native English sounds is much harder.
> Japanese at least has pretty straightforward phonetics, as far as an English-speaking audience is concerned, but the tonal nature of Chinese and it's abundance of non-native English sounds is much harder.
What's the abundance of non-native sounds? The Mandarin sequence of palatals ("x" / "j" / "q") is also present in Japanese. And while they're strange, they aren't all that strange to the English ear. Mandarin has /y/ ("yu"), the high front rounded vowel, which English doesn't, but Japanese has the much stranger /ɯ/, the high back unrounded vowel.
Mandarin has tone, and so does Japanese, though it is admittedly much less significant in Japanese than it is in Mandarin.
Mandarin does distinguish between two vowels where I would really prefer to think of both vowels as schwa.
There are other Mandarin sounds that don't occur in English (e.g. pinyin "c" / "b" / "d" / "g"), but English speakers can happily just ignore the things that make those sounds weird. (As they also can for "x" / "j" / "q", and also for /ɯ/ in Japanese.)
In general, any two languages will show a large number of fairly obvious phonetic differences with each other, and a staggeringly large number of minor phonetic differences. But I don't see that Japanese is all that much closer to English than Mandarin is. Japanese has a simpler phonological structure than Mandarin does, but even there, Japanese is extremely simple, Mandarin is very simple, and English is incredibly complex.
I see I'm almost a year late but I have to respond to this.
>Mandarin palatals
To my (non-Mandarin-native-but-Sinitic-native-but-also-Standarin-speaking) ears, the ⟨j⟩, ⟨q⟩, ⟨x⟩ of Standarin ("Standard Mandarin") are somewhere between /s/ and /ɕ/. Japanese /ɕ/ is significantly more palatal imo.
>Mandarin /y/, Japanese /ɯ/
Japanese /ɯ/ is produced with compressed lips, which makes it acoustically similar to the sound [u]. I would consider /u/ a much better transcription. It's also quite distinct (again, to my ears) from, e.g., Vietnamese or Miyako /ɯ/, which are more central examples of the high back unrounded vowel.
Not much to say about Mandarin /y/, except that it was present in Old English.
>Mandarin sounds that don't occur in English
I would say that's inaccurate. English word-initial /b/, /d/, /g/ are often devoiced to unaspirated [p], [t], [k], contrasting with /p/, /t/, /k/'s realizations as [pʰ], [tʰ], [kʰ]. Which means English ⟨b⟩, ⟨d⟩, ⟨g⟩ oftentimes correspond to Pinyin ⟨b⟩, ⟨d⟩, ⟨g⟩ perfectly fine. ⟨z⟩ and ⟨c⟩ are not present though (at least not in the same contexts).
One thing you didn't mention is phonemic vowel length in Japanese, which afaik is absent in major American accents.
> One thing you didn't mention is phonemic vowel length in Japanese, which afaik is absent in major American accents.
And how. I believe there's some debate over whether it's appropriate to call it "phonemic vowel length" in Japanese - it's not just that they distinguish a set of long vowels from a set of short vowels; any given vowel in Japanese has a measured length and triple-length vowels are attested. This tends to lend itself to the idea that what's going on is that there is only one length for vowels, but consecutive vowels don't contract.
You see some phenomena that might be considered "phonemic vowel length" in Mandarin too, in words like 服务 /fuu/ and 答案 /taan/. The tone contour helps there though.
Vowel length is a relevant feature in American English, but it's not phonemic. Vowels are allophonically lengthened in many circumstances where they precede voiced consonants. (Stops? All voiced consonants? I'm not sure.) This is most relevant when whispering.
I am given to understand that there is a system of phonemic vowel length in Australian English.
> Japanese /ɯ/ is produced with compressed lips, which makes it acoustically similar to the sound [u].
The Japanese vowel is quite obviously distinct (to the Anglophone ear) from an English /u/. This also goes for Japanese /ɕ/ vs English /ʃ/, but it looks like you feel the same way on that one.
Tangentially, I've gotten the impression that when a word-final vowel is followed by the same vowel word-initially in Mandarin, the speaker has a free choice of whether or not to insert a glottal stop at the word boundary. Would you agree?
This is why I really feel for the Japanese translators of Buddhist texts. They've completely mangled many Pali and Sanskrit names, admittedly because they sometimes were first transliterated into Chinese and then to Japanese, but I think this was the right choice.
English and (Sanskrit + Pali) have enough phonological overlap that the names don't have to be too significantly altered, just some eliding of phonological distinctions that exist in Sanskrit and Pali and don't in English.
But this is kind of terrible, because I find it's hard to make these names "stick" in my mind because I don't have a real sense for what Sanskrit and Pali words and names should sound like, so when names and words get longer than about two syllables it's easy to get it all mixed up. Add to this that Sanskrit and Pali words have all kinds of subtle meanings because it just so happens that one word kind of sounds like another so it picks up some connotation from it (basically, puns) and as an English speaker there's no hope of remembering these even after it's all explained.
This is basically my long way of saying we probably should just call the Buddha "Greg Shaker" or some other terrible bastardization, etc. etc.
Yeah, you do have to feel sympathy for the Chinese and Japanese Buddhists. No wonder "Journey To The West" is all about going to India to get the real, true, proper scriptures!
My favourite bit is turning a male Bodhisattva, Avalokiteśvara, into a female one, Kuanyin - though enough of the ambiguity is kept that sometimes Kuanyin appears in a male avatar.
And then Japanese Christians in periods of persecution disguised statues of Mary and the child Jesus as statues of Kuanyin/Kannon:
And returning back on that, a modern Taiwanese Buddhist charity has reversed this:
"One example of this comparison can be found in Tzu Chi, a Taiwanese Buddhist humanitarian organisation, which noticed the similarity between this form of Guanyin and the Virgin Mary. The organisation commissioned a portrait of Guanyin holding a baby, closely resembling the typical Catholic Madonna and Child painting. Copies of this portrait are now displayed prominently in Tzu Chi affiliated medical centres, especially since Tzu Chi's founder is a Buddhist master and her supporters come from various religious backgrounds."
As I read it, I thought you'd combined Hoover and (Mitt) Romney, along with a smattering of Marco Rubio and changed their parties... until the last sentence.
I thought Scott’s piece on Xi Jinping was really pretty bad, the worst of his dictator series by far. He seemed to refuse to take seriously the idea that China had a reasoned and functional governance model, one that worked. Since Xi Jinping is very much a product of that model - unlike other dictators who were more dissident to their governing elite - that made it very difficult for Scott to portray Xi I thought. He kept defaulting to this picture of a bunch of squabbling individual elites where Xi somehow came out on top.
In this piece he seems to realize the problem and challenge himself to re-imagine Xi as a product of a system Scott can understand, in this case the American one. But of course the Chinese system is quite different than ours. Preparatory to writing about Xi, I would suggest some reading on the Chinese political system in general, e.g “The China Model” by Daniel Bell. There are plenty of others
Can you be more specific? Your comment here is saying that Scott's model of Xi and China's governance is wrong, but not really explaining where it's wrong or what the correct model looks like.
Assuming I don't have time to read an entire book that explains why the Chinese model of government is great, actually, can you summarize?
China is not a democracy so we tend to apply a generalized "autocracy" frame to it, which can be quite negative (corrupt, personalized rule etc.). Perhaps reflecting this generalized negative sense about autocracies, Scott claimed in his previous article on Xi Jinping that China had a system "similar" to the Soviet Union which is false. The systems are quite different despite some superficial similarities. Autocratic systems differ a lot and China has been very conscious about building governance mechanisms that make room for market mechanisms while trying to restrain corruption, solicit public opinion on policy choices, test different policies locally and examine success or failure before expanding the policy, and a personnel/promotion system designed to measure governance success before promotion. These are actually all things democratic elections are supposed to do, but China uses other mechanisms. This is not to idealize it, I'm sure they fail a lot, but if you don't take their system seriously and just view it as a primitive pre-democratic form of government and its participants and corrupt autocrats you are going to have a harder time understanding someone like Xi who is a product of that system.
Thanks for this, I felt like there were some missing pieces to Scott's review, but wasn't sure where to look. Like, all these hanging questions about 'but why did X thing happen after Y? What were the underlying systems or forces that caused this?' I don't feel I have the time for in-depth reading on the subject, but I find comparative analysis of systems of governance fascinating, and I hope someone does something related to this for the next round of book reviews.
A few weeks ago Scott posted to one of the comment sections, asking for anyone who had an understanding of politics in China and especially the Politburo to contact him because he wanted feedback on the draft of the post about Xi. I think it was one of the open threads. It’s too bad you didn’t see that/didn’t respond!
Arguably, he could have sent a subscriber-only post asking for feedback. That might have reached more people. It also might have opened a weird door to collaborations, though.
It seemed to me that he was aware he needed more information/perspective and he was seeking it.
I don’t know enough about politics in China, at all, to judge how well he did. Being also an American, though, I can say the cartoonization of politics here is very hard to escape. One can be aware of it and fight it intellectually and still find it creeping in.
Presumably now he has your recommendations for resources and can use them if he does another piece on China or Xi.
Agree, although the gag of 'normal political career' followed by 'dictator for life and imprisoning half of Alaska' does go against this point. Imo, seeing the normality of Xi's career and his actions as leader as consistent says positive things about your empirical understanding of China.
The Xinjiang situation is hard to analogise today, but this piece could have been set to position Shea as president during a more tumultuous time where imprisoning large amounts of people seems more plausible to the American reader. American presidents have indeed presided over such things without the American public minding too much, as have America's allies. As they say, 'the past is a different country'.
This was really cool! As you did it in this case, I agree it feels more like some sort of performance art than a really useful history, but "failure" seems too far. Done right it seems like it has a lot of potential, and even as-is I really liked it.
Very happy to see a reference to "Le ton beau de Marot" - one my favorite books, sadly underrated (IMHO), and oddly, as Hofstadter points out at some point, a rare example of a book that's probably untranslatable.
When I read GEB I naively thought it would be untranslatable. Then some years later I read the Dutch translation and was fascinated by how good it was. I picked up Le ton beau de Marot because it fed into that fascination, but it is so much more. It is also a beautiful, very personal, and touching book. Highly recommended!
I really enjoyed this one. It took me until the first sentence of section II for everything to snap into place. I'm interested in how this compares to other readers. Anyone want to share when they figured out what was going on?
as soon as he described the older sister committing suicide which also happened to Xi. In his case it wasn't for undetermined reasons it seems to have been the Red Guard sacking their house and hounding her to death -- a lot worse than Scott's McCarthyism analogy.
"At 22, he was accepted to Harvard, where he studied engineering."
While Harvard does have an engineering school, it's an odd choice (i.e., most people who could get into Harvard & want an engineering degree would choose, e.g., MIT; most people who want a Harvard degree for its cachet would choose a different major). That broke me out of the flow enough to remember the bit about the Politburo being dominated by engineers-for-prestige.
Agreed, that one caught my eye too. The subtext requires a pretty nuanced understanding of university program rankings, but it's a really good analogy - maps on to the Tsinghua Clique effects, too!
I thought it was going to be an AU where Obama didn't win any terms and this was the 'ideal' Republican candidate who could have beaten him, but the twist in the end did take me completely by surprise.
I figured it out when he was sent to Iowa and forced to do back-breaking labor, because I knew that had happened to Xi. Him studying engineering just confirmed the suspicion.
You get at something important, that basic history is hard when you are unfamiliar with the culture and the names of a place. When I read about mid-20th century Britain, it's easy to remember Churchill, Eden, Chamberlain, etc. Reading about China, I feel like I need two or three times as much exposure to someone's name to have them etched in my head and I can remember who they are. And that's just names. The political system is the same way, a political party basically appointing the government but actually being different from the government is very strange to our eyes. So when hearing a guy in China was party boss in province x versus governor in province x, it takes effort to remember the differences between the two things, while concepts like "governor versus mayor" is easy.
I've studied a few languages and it's the same way. French is relatively easy to read, you know the Latin alphabet, it's second nature, the way my mind works is when I need to speak French I can picture a word in my head after having read it before. When we read in our native script, we usually do it word by word, not each individual letter. If an English speaker is studying a language with the Cyrillic or Arabic script, you have to constantly go letter by letter, and words don't "stick" in your mind the same way.
I guess the point here is that language and cultural differences are a huge barrier to understanding foreign countries and cultures. If you want to, it's probably not something you should want to start doing as an adult, and our understanding is always very incomplete.
I always find it funny when I'm supposed to listen to a "China expert" or "Russia expert." What if I got my idea about US politics from "America experts"? Political scientists who study their own country seem to me to have a lot of silly ideas based on ideology and confirmation bias and to get many things wrong. An American-born academic therefore shouldn't be expected to have that much insight about a foreign culture.
(Incidentally, I've always loved a passage in this paper that I believe should get some kind of Lifetime Achievement Award for humorous understatement:
> In the moving window technique we restrict the amount of text that is visible to a certain number of letters around the fixation point, and replace all of the other letters on a page with the letter x. The readers task is simply to read the page of text. Interestingly it is also possible to do the reverse and just replace the letters at the fixation point with the letter x, but this is very frustrating to the reader.
I read the article you linked to, and it seems to me that it's just a longer and extremely complicated way of saying "we usually [read] word by word, not each individual letter."
Really? The findings that number of visible letters has a strong effect on reading speed, that whether or not full words are visible is completely irrelevant, that letters are recognized individually, all of that says to you "reading takes place at the level of words, not the level of letters"?
The paper is quite explicit about what's going on:
> Up to 15 letters there is a linear relation between the number of letters that are available to the reader and the speed of reading.
> reading is not necessarily faster when entire subsequent words are available; similar reading speeds can be found when only a few letters are available.
> letter information is being collected within the fixation span even when the entire word is not being recognized.
It's interesting to me that you appear to think the appropriate cultural translation of Fujian is "Florida". To me, this only makes sense from a geographic perspective. ("They're both in the southeast of the country.")
As an American with no real knowledge of Florida, I can provide some associations: Disney World, orange cultivation, hicks, swamp, retirement communities, warm weather...
And the "swamp" and "warm weather" aspects probably do translate over to Fujian. But what else Fujian is known for is pretty different: the notable aspects of Fujian are (1) its history of intense commercialism, being the focus of most of China's oceangoing trade (I don't know how true this is in the modern day, but historically it's enormous); and (2) its tremendous academic overachievement. Fujian is to China as the Jews were to Germany. (Still very much true in the modern day.)
If I wanted to choose an American state to mirror those aspects of Fujian, I'd probably pick New York. Florida seems fairly opposite.
It's a state, not a city. You think Georgia is the commercial powerhouse of the US? All the best universities have to impose quotas on Georgia so that Georgians won't just take all the spots?
Oh, I'm not saying the allegory needs to match what I think about Fujian. I was surprised by your suggestions about what would match from my perspective, not by the post using a different perspective. (Though I do still wonder if the perspective the post takes is intentional.)
I am interested in what you're saying about the American "elite economy" and "centers of power". In the post, Scott presents Virginia as an unimportant region (matching the impression I get of it from American culture), but Virginia is very close to the center of power in the US - Virginia is where the people who work in DC live! New York City is pretty far from that, best known for being a financial and media hub.
For New York to be a center of American power, the center of American power would need to be defined by bankers, journalists, or entertainers rather than by politicians. (I tend to assume you're thinking of the journalists?) And that in itself is an interesting observation that highlights some important cultural differences from China that will tend to make cultural translation difficult.
So, different people have different perspectives. But, historically and culturally in the USA, power disproportionately lies in the northeast - NYC and Boston. Other national centers of influence are Chicago, Dallas & LA (the Port, not Hollywood). Atlanta is a newer one, as is Houston.
Centers of interest and local power are Orlando, New Orleans, Seattle, SF, Memphis, Cleveland, Denver. In another ten years, tech/cyber make make changes in that ranking, but given the geography free nature of the web, that may never come to pass.
You are correct, I think, to say that in the US power rests in the economy - bankers and industry - rather than in politics. The rise of DC as a decisive political player is relatively new, and disquieting to many people.
As for entertainers and journalists being power centers...God forbid. I suspect that this will come sooner rather than later, but for now both are subservient to the economy, not drivers.
"Virginia is where the people who work in DC live!"
From what I have gathered from various comments online by people living in Virginia, there are the neighbourhoods where the people who work in D.C. live, and then there is the rest of Virginia, and these are two very separate things.
So Foggy Bottom etc. are the powerbase associated with Washington D.C. and the people living and working there have more culturally and socially in common with New York (and maybe Los Angeles), but the rest of Virginia is indeed written off as unimportant.
Very true, but that applies everywhere. California is supposed to be culturally divided into "Southern California" (Los Angeles) and "Northern California" (the Bay Area). But "Northern California" is about halfway up California; any logical approach would call it "Central California". To the north, there's a vast expanse of farmers and ranchers who are written off as unimportant by everyone.
And yet, "California" is considered very important, because it contains important places. It's not considered unimportant because it also contains unimportant places.
This was really fun, I didn't see the twist coming at all. Even if you think it didn't end up coming together, I'm glad to have seen it.
Translation is weirder than people realize. I think there's a lot to be gained from reflecting on what makes a translation "good". If you have an answer to that, you can invoke it to solve some of the hardest problems in epistemology, like what "meaning" is, and philosophy of science, like how "verisimilitude" works. It's no coincidence that Nietzsche was a philologist.
I liked it, it's an interesting idea, (translate to some culture you know.)
I have no idea but I think to understand China you have to live and interact there.
OK this is about a Korean post doc in a US physics lab, but it's my best reference point to a different culture. I was hired into a lab to fill/ finish off, some leaving post doc. It was a new field to me, but I knew a lot of experimental techniques, so not a complete idiot, and I might know something.
The head post doc in the lab at the time was Korean, and he knew way more than I did. But sometimes he'd say something about the electronics (or something) that I did understand, and when I tried to correct him he would ignore me. Not in a bad way or anything, but my impression was things I had to say were worthless to him. (there were several grad students they would listen, and anyway not a big deal.) Then someone in the lab had a Birthday, there was pizza or something and we got talking about birthdays. And it turned out I was born ~1 week before the Korean postdoc. It was like a switch had been thrown, my ideas now had merit and he would listen to them. There were other Korean grad students in the department that explained it to me... but still it was weird for me. I will add that it was all good and we got a ton of great data! (Studying shallow impurity states in semiconductors, shallow in this case means not that far (deep) from the conduction or valance bands)
Oh and thanks for the Douglas Hofstadter book. I haven't read him much since GEB and SciAm, series. Can I still enjoy the translation book if I don't know French?
I enjoyed this but also agree that this was somewhat of a failed project. I realized what you were doing once I read about the sister committing suicide.
It has been years since I read that book. My fuzzy recollection is that it was a very disappointing sequel to GEB. There was a running theme of translations of the same poem at various levels of literality. He just never really persuaded me of the more interesting claims he made about the nature of translation. (Example—whatever the utility of substituting “Aristotle” for that Chinese phrase in an English-language text, I am unpersuaded that this operates as anything like a viable translation.)
This was pretty great and I didn't catch the concept until you revealed it. More like this, please.
(and the concept of cultural translation is interesting - I've seen little bits of this this in good anime dubs, with the subs on at the same time, where "he's such a 2channer" or the like as a put-down , in the subs, was changed to a reference to being a Star Trek nerd in the dub.)
Interesting, and yay for the shout-out to "Le Ton beau de Marot"!
It reminds me of approaches to Bible translation. There's a spectrum from very literal translations like the ESV, which sound a bit stilted in English and often need extra commentary to understand, down to heavily paraphrased ones like The Message, which re-cast the Hebrew and Greek idioms into more familiar English ones and generally sound more natural, at the expense of some accuracy... and then there's the Cotton Patch Bible, which transports the entire thing to the southern US, gives everyone American names, has Jesus executed by the American state and Paul travelling around the South telling people about him and eventually getting an audience in Washington.
The Confucius->Aristotle thing also reminded me of (earlier versions of?) Google Translate - because it uses a statistical approach and returns "the word English speakers tend to use in the same context that foreign speakers use the input word", you get things like Tokyo being translated as London.
I've heard people someone say that Wuhan is like Chicago, the Yangtze is like the Mississippi, North China is like the East US, and South China is like the West US. So think also of Shanghai as Atlanta/Houston/Austin/NewOrleans sort of all in one, Pearl River Delta as like the Bay Area / all of California, and Beijing/Tianjin as the BosWash megalopolis. In this analogy calling Xinjiang Alaska is pretty reasonable (Uighurs are like the Native Alaskans, I guess), I guess Yunnan is rural Cascadia.
The Beijing area is the center of political power with the most prestigious universities, whereas the Cantonese area was the place with all of the trade and so on, and Shenzhen is the big tech center. It also is true that the immigration to the US West came originally from the Cantonese area.
"Pearl River Delta as like the Bay Area / all of California"
Huh, from my limited reading of historical fiction set in China, my impression of the Pearl River Delta was a semi-tropical hellhole, swampy and full of heat, disease, venomous animals and corruption, where those northerners exiled from the Imperial court were sent to perish from said heat, disease, and corruption.
So more like the popular impression of Florida or Louisiana?
Certainly that is the traditional view of the Pearl River Delta, but it's also the traditional view of all of South China, where the boundary between North and South is the Huai River, which is north of the Yangtze: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huai_River
I figured I'd ask ChatGPT to do the same thing since my heuristic is "LLMs do translation really well".
The prompt was:
"Please give a 4 paragraph biography of Xi Xinping"
... <it does so, skipping over any controversy>
"Please translate the above biography into an American context. Change Chinese place names into roughly equivalent American place names, change naems of chinese politicians to roughly equivalent American politicians, and change Xi Xinping's name to David Shea, the fictional 44th President of the United States."
... <it does so, but invents some fictional american institutions>
"Rewrite the above biography, but be sure to only refer to real American institutions, not fictional ones."
... <it fixes a few things>
"Rewrite the above, but incorporate even more details of Xi Xinping's life into the americanized version. For example, mention how he became leader for life, and also add in details about his malevolent actions as dictator"
<it complains that it can't do that Dave, but finally relents, giving this:>
"""
It is important to note that in the United States, the President has a term limit of two terms, a President cannot become "leader for life" as the political system is different than that of China. However, I'll try to incorporate more details of Xi Jinping's life into the Americanized version of the biography keeping in mind the limitations of the American political system and laws.
David Shea is an American politician who has served as the President of the United States, since 20XX.
David Shea was born in New York City in 19XX to John Shea, a political leader and former Vice President of the United States. David Shea graduated from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts with a degree in chemical engineering in 19XX, and began his political career in the Democratic Party soon after. He held various positions in the Democratic Party in the states of California and New York before becoming the Governor of California in 20XX and the Governor of New York in 20XX.
In 20XX, David Shea was appointed as a member of the Democratic National Committee and a member of the Democratic Leadership Council, the top decision-making body in the United States. He was also appointed as the Vice President of the United States in 20XX. In 20XX, he was elected as the President of the United States, succeeding Barack Obama.
As the leader of the United States, David Shea has focused on implementing economic reforms, fighting corruption, and strengthening the Democratic Party's control over the government. He has also promoted the "American Dream" of national rejuvenation and modernization. Under David Shea's leadership, United States has increased its global influence through initiatives such as the North American trade agreements. However, David Shea's leadership also marked with criticisms of his increasing control over the media, limiting civil liberties, and cracking down on political dissent. He also faced allegations of human rights violation in his handling of certain domestic issues.
"""
(For some reason my brain scrambled Jason -> David in between when I read this blog post and when I went to ChatGPT, oh well)
Well I'm eight months late to the party but at least I'm the first person to say: does the picture of Jason Shea look suspiciously like Ron DeSantis to anyone else?
Well, one of those technical reasons is that "confucius" is unambiguously a single word, notionally a name, but it definitely is not "the Latin form of his name" -- in Chinese the name is 孔 kong and 夫子 fuzi is an honorific title. "Confucius" is a very weird choice to 'translate' that; you'd expect something more like "Con sapiens".
Note that Confucius is also frequently referred to as 孔子, and -- classically -- just plain 子.
Well... you're being very sloppy in your terminology. It's hard to justify calling "Confucius" "the Latin form of his name", because that's not what it is. Rather, "Confucius" is two other things: (1) it is a Latinized transcription of 孔夫子; (2) it is the name by which he is generally known in Latin. But it can't be the Latin form of his name, because it is the Latin form of 孔夫子 and 孔夫子 is not his name.
Similarly, the founder of Alibaba is known as "Jack Ma" in English and his name is 马云 mǎ yún, but we don't go around saying that "Jack" is "the English form of yún". That would be a very strange position to take.
> Different time period, but Roman writers were bigger on transliteration of names than translation - there are at least two modern books trying to reconstruct Celtic names from the phonetic Latin renditions in Caesar's works, for instance
I was under the impression that Megas Alexandros was known to the Romans as Alexander Magnus.
Given the best sellers written by presidents which are memoirs, autobiographies, and variations on self-help books, absolutely "Jason Shea Thought" would be a runner, except it would need a snappier, snazzier name for the American market.
Something like "Be The Change You Hope To Make Great Again"?
I obtained the Moss Roberts translation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms because, from what I could find on the internet, it's supposed to be an excellent translation.
But I was hugely disappointed to read in the preface "The characters are referred to by many names. For the convenience of the reader, we always use a single name for each character." [my paraphrase]
I want to know all the epithets. If you want to make it convenient for the reader to know who the text is talking about, print the epithet and footnote the name of the character it identifies. :(
This was oddly compelling to me and I'd 100% buy/read a book of fictional history from you.
Have you read unsong?
Oddly, no. I know it exists and I've never thought to actually pick it up somehow. Is it like this?
It's an alternate-history full of puns and cabbalistic correspondences and supernatural beings
I feel silly having not read it. I've been reading the blog since forever, you'd think I would have got around to it by now.
I read the first chapter shortly after it came out because someone linked it on Facebook, then saw there was only one chapter up and forgot about it for several years. Then I became a fan of SlateStarCodex independently and read it for years without realizing that his book Unsong was that cool kabbala-themed story I had read one chapter of back in the day. Then I figured it out and still waited a couple years to get around to trying it. Then I enjoyed it immensely.
Yes, it's by Scott and it's Scott basically writing an alternative history. So if you liked this you'd love unsong. I didn't realize it was so good until a few months ago.
I'll check it out for sure - like I said, no good reason I haven't until now.
There are a few chapters about the alternate fantasy history of the US which cover US presidents. They're a lot more humourous than any sort of serious alt history but might be the vibe you're interested in. I for one enjoyed them a lot.
Don't get me wrong, *Unsong* is not bad, but IMO it's totally different from the current post.
Agreed, except that I'd prefer it to be an annotated book of real history -- perhaps with the fiction on one page, and the truth on the other.
Ah, "Jason" is a two-syllable given name that starts with a J, like Jinping. Of course "Shea" is just Xi.
I thought it was a reference to Harold Shea, for the alt-history vibe, and totally missed that!
Before I got to the punch line, I'd been wondering if this was an alternative history about some obscure relative of William Shea, a prominent and politically influential mid-20th century lawyer most notable in hindsight for his role in brokering the deals for MLB to approve the first round of expansion teams. Shea Stadium, the long time home field for the New York Mets, was named after him.
This was fun. I seem to remember getting confused swimming through all the Chinese names in Three-Body Problem. Perhaps those anime distributors who aggressively Americanized names (Usagi->Serena, Naru->Molly for Sailor Moon iirc) had a good point!
Yeah, I think a lot of people don't give translation enough as an genuine art form where there aren't really "correct answers".
If you're trying to preserve the culture and context of the original work, then probably should leave names mostly untouched, but if you're trying to make characters that are memorable to a foreign audience, changing them may be a useful choice.
Chinese is particularly bad here - Japanese at least has pretty straightforward phonetics, as far as an English-speaking audience is concerned, but the tonal nature of Chinese and it's abundance of non-native English sounds is much harder.
> Japanese at least has pretty straightforward phonetics, as far as an English-speaking audience is concerned, but the tonal nature of Chinese and it's abundance of non-native English sounds is much harder.
What's the abundance of non-native sounds? The Mandarin sequence of palatals ("x" / "j" / "q") is also present in Japanese. And while they're strange, they aren't all that strange to the English ear. Mandarin has /y/ ("yu"), the high front rounded vowel, which English doesn't, but Japanese has the much stranger /ɯ/, the high back unrounded vowel.
Mandarin has tone, and so does Japanese, though it is admittedly much less significant in Japanese than it is in Mandarin.
Mandarin does distinguish between two vowels where I would really prefer to think of both vowels as schwa.
There are other Mandarin sounds that don't occur in English (e.g. pinyin "c" / "b" / "d" / "g"), but English speakers can happily just ignore the things that make those sounds weird. (As they also can for "x" / "j" / "q", and also for /ɯ/ in Japanese.)
In general, any two languages will show a large number of fairly obvious phonetic differences with each other, and a staggeringly large number of minor phonetic differences. But I don't see that Japanese is all that much closer to English than Mandarin is. Japanese has a simpler phonological structure than Mandarin does, but even there, Japanese is extremely simple, Mandarin is very simple, and English is incredibly complex.
I see I'm almost a year late but I have to respond to this.
>Mandarin palatals
To my (non-Mandarin-native-but-Sinitic-native-but-also-Standarin-speaking) ears, the ⟨j⟩, ⟨q⟩, ⟨x⟩ of Standarin ("Standard Mandarin") are somewhere between /s/ and /ɕ/. Japanese /ɕ/ is significantly more palatal imo.
>Mandarin /y/, Japanese /ɯ/
Japanese /ɯ/ is produced with compressed lips, which makes it acoustically similar to the sound [u]. I would consider /u/ a much better transcription. It's also quite distinct (again, to my ears) from, e.g., Vietnamese or Miyako /ɯ/, which are more central examples of the high back unrounded vowel.
Not much to say about Mandarin /y/, except that it was present in Old English.
>Mandarin sounds that don't occur in English
I would say that's inaccurate. English word-initial /b/, /d/, /g/ are often devoiced to unaspirated [p], [t], [k], contrasting with /p/, /t/, /k/'s realizations as [pʰ], [tʰ], [kʰ]. Which means English ⟨b⟩, ⟨d⟩, ⟨g⟩ oftentimes correspond to Pinyin ⟨b⟩, ⟨d⟩, ⟨g⟩ perfectly fine. ⟨z⟩ and ⟨c⟩ are not present though (at least not in the same contexts).
One thing you didn't mention is phonemic vowel length in Japanese, which afaik is absent in major American accents.
> One thing you didn't mention is phonemic vowel length in Japanese, which afaik is absent in major American accents.
And how. I believe there's some debate over whether it's appropriate to call it "phonemic vowel length" in Japanese - it's not just that they distinguish a set of long vowels from a set of short vowels; any given vowel in Japanese has a measured length and triple-length vowels are attested. This tends to lend itself to the idea that what's going on is that there is only one length for vowels, but consecutive vowels don't contract.
You see some phenomena that might be considered "phonemic vowel length" in Mandarin too, in words like 服务 /fuu/ and 答案 /taan/. The tone contour helps there though.
Vowel length is a relevant feature in American English, but it's not phonemic. Vowels are allophonically lengthened in many circumstances where they precede voiced consonants. (Stops? All voiced consonants? I'm not sure.) This is most relevant when whispering.
I am given to understand that there is a system of phonemic vowel length in Australian English.
> Japanese /ɯ/ is produced with compressed lips, which makes it acoustically similar to the sound [u].
The Japanese vowel is quite obviously distinct (to the Anglophone ear) from an English /u/. This also goes for Japanese /ɕ/ vs English /ʃ/, but it looks like you feel the same way on that one.
Tangentially, I've gotten the impression that when a word-final vowel is followed by the same vowel word-initially in Mandarin, the speaker has a free choice of whether or not to insert a glottal stop at the word boundary. Would you agree?
This is why I really feel for the Japanese translators of Buddhist texts. They've completely mangled many Pali and Sanskrit names, admittedly because they sometimes were first transliterated into Chinese and then to Japanese, but I think this was the right choice.
English and (Sanskrit + Pali) have enough phonological overlap that the names don't have to be too significantly altered, just some eliding of phonological distinctions that exist in Sanskrit and Pali and don't in English.
But this is kind of terrible, because I find it's hard to make these names "stick" in my mind because I don't have a real sense for what Sanskrit and Pali words and names should sound like, so when names and words get longer than about two syllables it's easy to get it all mixed up. Add to this that Sanskrit and Pali words have all kinds of subtle meanings because it just so happens that one word kind of sounds like another so it picks up some connotation from it (basically, puns) and as an English speaker there's no hope of remembering these even after it's all explained.
This is basically my long way of saying we probably should just call the Buddha "Greg Shaker" or some other terrible bastardization, etc. etc.
Yeah, you do have to feel sympathy for the Chinese and Japanese Buddhists. No wonder "Journey To The West" is all about going to India to get the real, true, proper scriptures!
My favourite bit is turning a male Bodhisattva, Avalokiteśvara, into a female one, Kuanyin - though enough of the ambiguity is kept that sometimes Kuanyin appears in a male avatar.
And then Japanese Christians in periods of persecution disguised statues of Mary and the child Jesus as statues of Kuanyin/Kannon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakure_Kirishitan
And returning back on that, a modern Taiwanese Buddhist charity has reversed this:
"One example of this comparison can be found in Tzu Chi, a Taiwanese Buddhist humanitarian organisation, which noticed the similarity between this form of Guanyin and the Virgin Mary. The organisation commissioned a portrait of Guanyin holding a baby, closely resembling the typical Catholic Madonna and Child painting. Copies of this portrait are now displayed prominently in Tzu Chi affiliated medical centres, especially since Tzu Chi's founder is a Buddhist master and her supporters come from various religious backgrounds."
As I read it, I thought you'd combined Hoover and (Mitt) Romney, along with a smattering of Marco Rubio and changed their parties... until the last sentence.
I thought Scott’s piece on Xi Jinping was really pretty bad, the worst of his dictator series by far. He seemed to refuse to take seriously the idea that China had a reasoned and functional governance model, one that worked. Since Xi Jinping is very much a product of that model - unlike other dictators who were more dissident to their governing elite - that made it very difficult for Scott to portray Xi I thought. He kept defaulting to this picture of a bunch of squabbling individual elites where Xi somehow came out on top.
In this piece he seems to realize the problem and challenge himself to re-imagine Xi as a product of a system Scott can understand, in this case the American one. But of course the Chinese system is quite different than ours. Preparatory to writing about Xi, I would suggest some reading on the Chinese political system in general, e.g “The China Model” by Daniel Bell. There are plenty of others
Can you be more specific? Your comment here is saying that Scott's model of Xi and China's governance is wrong, but not really explaining where it's wrong or what the correct model looks like.
Assuming I don't have time to read an entire book that explains why the Chinese model of government is great, actually, can you summarize?
China is not a democracy so we tend to apply a generalized "autocracy" frame to it, which can be quite negative (corrupt, personalized rule etc.). Perhaps reflecting this generalized negative sense about autocracies, Scott claimed in his previous article on Xi Jinping that China had a system "similar" to the Soviet Union which is false. The systems are quite different despite some superficial similarities. Autocratic systems differ a lot and China has been very conscious about building governance mechanisms that make room for market mechanisms while trying to restrain corruption, solicit public opinion on policy choices, test different policies locally and examine success or failure before expanding the policy, and a personnel/promotion system designed to measure governance success before promotion. These are actually all things democratic elections are supposed to do, but China uses other mechanisms. This is not to idealize it, I'm sure they fail a lot, but if you don't take their system seriously and just view it as a primitive pre-democratic form of government and its participants and corrupt autocrats you are going to have a harder time understanding someone like Xi who is a product of that system.
Thanks for this, I felt like there were some missing pieces to Scott's review, but wasn't sure where to look. Like, all these hanging questions about 'but why did X thing happen after Y? What were the underlying systems or forces that caused this?' I don't feel I have the time for in-depth reading on the subject, but I find comparative analysis of systems of governance fascinating, and I hope someone does something related to this for the next round of book reviews.
A few weeks ago Scott posted to one of the comment sections, asking for anyone who had an understanding of politics in China and especially the Politburo to contact him because he wanted feedback on the draft of the post about Xi. I think it was one of the open threads. It’s too bad you didn’t see that/didn’t respond!
Arguably, he could have sent a subscriber-only post asking for feedback. That might have reached more people. It also might have opened a weird door to collaborations, though.
It seemed to me that he was aware he needed more information/perspective and he was seeking it.
I don’t know enough about politics in China, at all, to judge how well he did. Being also an American, though, I can say the cartoonization of politics here is very hard to escape. One can be aware of it and fight it intellectually and still find it creeping in.
Presumably now he has your recommendations for resources and can use them if he does another piece on China or Xi.
Agree, although the gag of 'normal political career' followed by 'dictator for life and imprisoning half of Alaska' does go against this point. Imo, seeing the normality of Xi's career and his actions as leader as consistent says positive things about your empirical understanding of China.
The Xinjiang situation is hard to analogise today, but this piece could have been set to position Shea as president during a more tumultuous time where imprisoning large amounts of people seems more plausible to the American reader. American presidents have indeed presided over such things without the American public minding too much, as have America's allies. As they say, 'the past is a different country'.
This was really cool! As you did it in this case, I agree it feels more like some sort of performance art than a really useful history, but "failure" seems too far. Done right it seems like it has a lot of potential, and even as-is I really liked it.
This implausible use of real references convinced me this was yet another AI-generated text until the middle of section 2 :)
Great effort, more of this please.
Very happy to see a reference to "Le ton beau de Marot" - one my favorite books, sadly underrated (IMHO), and oddly, as Hofstadter points out at some point, a rare example of a book that's probably untranslatable.
+1
When I read GEB I naively thought it would be untranslatable. Then some years later I read the Dutch translation and was fascinated by how good it was. I picked up Le ton beau de Marot because it fed into that fascination, but it is so much more. It is also a beautiful, very personal, and touching book. Highly recommended!
I really enjoyed this one. It took me until the first sentence of section II for everything to snap into place. I'm interested in how this compares to other readers. Anyone want to share when they figured out what was going on?
as soon as he described the older sister committing suicide which also happened to Xi. In his case it wasn't for undetermined reasons it seems to have been the Red Guard sacking their house and hounding her to death -- a lot worse than Scott's McCarthyism analogy.
For me, the second sentence of section II, basically as soon as I paused in the section.
"At 22, he was accepted to Harvard, where he studied engineering."
While Harvard does have an engineering school, it's an odd choice (i.e., most people who could get into Harvard & want an engineering degree would choose, e.g., MIT; most people who want a Harvard degree for its cachet would choose a different major). That broke me out of the flow enough to remember the bit about the Politburo being dominated by engineers-for-prestige.
Agreed, that one caught my eye too. The subtext requires a pretty nuanced understanding of university program rankings, but it's a really good analogy - maps on to the Tsinghua Clique effects, too!
>Angry mobs protested in front of his house; he received letters threatening his wife and children.
Something felt off about that.
>He sent young Jason to live with relatives in Iowa, while he continued fighting for his political life.
Yes, definitely something off.
>his relatives were strict disciplinarians, and he was forced to do backbreaking labor on their farm.
Aha! Sounds like Xi and the cultural revolution. Then I took another look at the photo, and recognised him.
I didn't get it at all. I kept thinking "wonder were he's going with this" untill the last sentence. Highly enjoyable anyway.
I thought it was going to be an AU where Obama didn't win any terms and this was the 'ideal' Republican candidate who could have beaten him, but the twist in the end did take me completely by surprise.
I figured it out when he was sent to Iowa and forced to do back-breaking labor, because I knew that had happened to Xi. Him studying engineering just confirmed the suspicion.
Interesting.
You get at something important, that basic history is hard when you are unfamiliar with the culture and the names of a place. When I read about mid-20th century Britain, it's easy to remember Churchill, Eden, Chamberlain, etc. Reading about China, I feel like I need two or three times as much exposure to someone's name to have them etched in my head and I can remember who they are. And that's just names. The political system is the same way, a political party basically appointing the government but actually being different from the government is very strange to our eyes. So when hearing a guy in China was party boss in province x versus governor in province x, it takes effort to remember the differences between the two things, while concepts like "governor versus mayor" is easy.
I've studied a few languages and it's the same way. French is relatively easy to read, you know the Latin alphabet, it's second nature, the way my mind works is when I need to speak French I can picture a word in my head after having read it before. When we read in our native script, we usually do it word by word, not each individual letter. If an English speaker is studying a language with the Cyrillic or Arabic script, you have to constantly go letter by letter, and words don't "stick" in your mind the same way.
I guess the point here is that language and cultural differences are a huge barrier to understanding foreign countries and cultures. If you want to, it's probably not something you should want to start doing as an adult, and our understanding is always very incomplete.
I always find it funny when I'm supposed to listen to a "China expert" or "Russia expert." What if I got my idea about US politics from "America experts"? Political scientists who study their own country seem to me to have a lot of silly ideas based on ideology and confirmation bias and to get many things wrong. An American-born academic therefore shouldn't be expected to have that much insight about a foreign culture.
> When we read in our native script, we usually do it word by word, not each individual letter.
This is a myth.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/develop/word-recognition
(Incidentally, I've always loved a passage in this paper that I believe should get some kind of Lifetime Achievement Award for humorous understatement:
> In the moving window technique we restrict the amount of text that is visible to a certain number of letters around the fixation point, and replace all of the other letters on a page with the letter x. The readers task is simply to read the page of text. Interestingly it is also possible to do the reverse and just replace the letters at the fixation point with the letter x, but this is very frustrating to the reader.
)
I read the article you linked to, and it seems to me that it's just a longer and extremely complicated way of saying "we usually [read] word by word, not each individual letter."
Really? The findings that number of visible letters has a strong effect on reading speed, that whether or not full words are visible is completely irrelevant, that letters are recognized individually, all of that says to you "reading takes place at the level of words, not the level of letters"?
The paper is quite explicit about what's going on:
> Up to 15 letters there is a linear relation between the number of letters that are available to the reader and the speed of reading.
> reading is not necessarily faster when entire subsequent words are available; similar reading speeds can be found when only a few letters are available.
> letter information is being collected within the fixation span even when the entire word is not being recognized.
It's interesting to me that you appear to think the appropriate cultural translation of Fujian is "Florida". To me, this only makes sense from a geographic perspective. ("They're both in the southeast of the country.")
As an American with no real knowledge of Florida, I can provide some associations: Disney World, orange cultivation, hicks, swamp, retirement communities, warm weather...
And the "swamp" and "warm weather" aspects probably do translate over to Fujian. But what else Fujian is known for is pretty different: the notable aspects of Fujian are (1) its history of intense commercialism, being the focus of most of China's oceangoing trade (I don't know how true this is in the modern day, but historically it's enormous); and (2) its tremendous academic overachievement. Fujian is to China as the Jews were to Germany. (Still very much true in the modern day.)
If I wanted to choose an American state to mirror those aspects of Fujian, I'd probably pick New York. Florida seems fairly opposite.
Eh. Atlanta is probably closer. NY is too central to the American elite economy to be a decent stand in.
Otherwise, San Francisco.
It's a state, not a city. You think Georgia is the commercial powerhouse of the US? All the best universities have to impose quotas on Georgia so that Georgians won't just take all the spots?
The translation will not be exact. NY is too close to the centers of power in the USA, I think, to be a fit for Fujian.
Also, lack of precision- or precise agreement with your perspective- isn't called for in this allegory, I think.
Oh, I'm not saying the allegory needs to match what I think about Fujian. I was surprised by your suggestions about what would match from my perspective, not by the post using a different perspective. (Though I do still wonder if the perspective the post takes is intentional.)
I am interested in what you're saying about the American "elite economy" and "centers of power". In the post, Scott presents Virginia as an unimportant region (matching the impression I get of it from American culture), but Virginia is very close to the center of power in the US - Virginia is where the people who work in DC live! New York City is pretty far from that, best known for being a financial and media hub.
For New York to be a center of American power, the center of American power would need to be defined by bankers, journalists, or entertainers rather than by politicians. (I tend to assume you're thinking of the journalists?) And that in itself is an interesting observation that highlights some important cultural differences from China that will tend to make cultural translation difficult.
So, different people have different perspectives. But, historically and culturally in the USA, power disproportionately lies in the northeast - NYC and Boston. Other national centers of influence are Chicago, Dallas & LA (the Port, not Hollywood). Atlanta is a newer one, as is Houston.
Centers of interest and local power are Orlando, New Orleans, Seattle, SF, Memphis, Cleveland, Denver. In another ten years, tech/cyber make make changes in that ranking, but given the geography free nature of the web, that may never come to pass.
You are correct, I think, to say that in the US power rests in the economy - bankers and industry - rather than in politics. The rise of DC as a decisive political player is relatively new, and disquieting to many people.
As for entertainers and journalists being power centers...God forbid. I suspect that this will come sooner rather than later, but for now both are subservient to the economy, not drivers.
At least, that is how I see it.
"Virginia is where the people who work in DC live!"
From what I have gathered from various comments online by people living in Virginia, there are the neighbourhoods where the people who work in D.C. live, and then there is the rest of Virginia, and these are two very separate things.
So Foggy Bottom etc. are the powerbase associated with Washington D.C. and the people living and working there have more culturally and socially in common with New York (and maybe Los Angeles), but the rest of Virginia is indeed written off as unimportant.
Very true, but that applies everywhere. California is supposed to be culturally divided into "Southern California" (Los Angeles) and "Northern California" (the Bay Area). But "Northern California" is about halfway up California; any logical approach would call it "Central California". To the north, there's a vast expanse of farmers and ranchers who are written off as unimportant by everyone.
And yet, "California" is considered very important, because it contains important places. It's not considered unimportant because it also contains unimportant places.
I enjoy the randomness Astral Codex Ten brings to my life
This was really fun, I didn't see the twist coming at all. Even if you think it didn't end up coming together, I'm glad to have seen it.
Translation is weirder than people realize. I think there's a lot to be gained from reflecting on what makes a translation "good". If you have an answer to that, you can invoke it to solve some of the hardest problems in epistemology, like what "meaning" is, and philosophy of science, like how "verisimilitude" works. It's no coincidence that Nietzsche was a philologist.
I liked it, it's an interesting idea, (translate to some culture you know.)
I have no idea but I think to understand China you have to live and interact there.
OK this is about a Korean post doc in a US physics lab, but it's my best reference point to a different culture. I was hired into a lab to fill/ finish off, some leaving post doc. It was a new field to me, but I knew a lot of experimental techniques, so not a complete idiot, and I might know something.
The head post doc in the lab at the time was Korean, and he knew way more than I did. But sometimes he'd say something about the electronics (or something) that I did understand, and when I tried to correct him he would ignore me. Not in a bad way or anything, but my impression was things I had to say were worthless to him. (there were several grad students they would listen, and anyway not a big deal.) Then someone in the lab had a Birthday, there was pizza or something and we got talking about birthdays. And it turned out I was born ~1 week before the Korean postdoc. It was like a switch had been thrown, my ideas now had merit and he would listen to them. There were other Korean grad students in the department that explained it to me... but still it was weird for me. I will add that it was all good and we got a ton of great data! (Studying shallow impurity states in semiconductors, shallow in this case means not that far (deep) from the conduction or valance bands)
Oh and thanks for the Douglas Hofstadter book. I haven't read him much since GEB and SciAm, series. Can I still enjoy the translation book if I don't know French?
Yes!
I enjoyed this but also agree that this was somewhat of a failed project. I realized what you were doing once I read about the sister committing suicide.
Thought this was some kind of GPT-3 generation before reading part II (maybe the generated image primed me), interesting exercise.
It has been years since I read that book. My fuzzy recollection is that it was a very disappointing sequel to GEB. There was a running theme of translations of the same poem at various levels of literality. He just never really persuaded me of the more interesting claims he made about the nature of translation. (Example—whatever the utility of substituting “Aristotle” for that Chinese phrase in an English-language text, I am unpersuaded that this operates as anything like a viable translation.)
In the English dub of Ranma 1/2, a character quotes Shakespeare instead of writers that play a similar cultural role in Japan.
this was a trip
ye it was
This was pretty great and I didn't catch the concept until you revealed it. More like this, please.
(and the concept of cultural translation is interesting - I've seen little bits of this this in good anime dubs, with the subs on at the same time, where "he's such a 2channer" or the like as a put-down , in the subs, was changed to a reference to being a Star Trek nerd in the dub.)
Interesting, and yay for the shout-out to "Le Ton beau de Marot"!
It reminds me of approaches to Bible translation. There's a spectrum from very literal translations like the ESV, which sound a bit stilted in English and often need extra commentary to understand, down to heavily paraphrased ones like The Message, which re-cast the Hebrew and Greek idioms into more familiar English ones and generally sound more natural, at the expense of some accuracy... and then there's the Cotton Patch Bible, which transports the entire thing to the southern US, gives everyone American names, has Jesus executed by the American state and Paul travelling around the South telling people about him and eventually getting an audience in Washington.
The Confucius->Aristotle thing also reminded me of (earlier versions of?) Google Translate - because it uses a statistical approach and returns "the word English speakers tend to use in the same context that foreign speakers use the input word", you get things like Tokyo being translated as London.
I've heard people someone say that Wuhan is like Chicago, the Yangtze is like the Mississippi, North China is like the East US, and South China is like the West US. So think also of Shanghai as Atlanta/Houston/Austin/NewOrleans sort of all in one, Pearl River Delta as like the Bay Area / all of California, and Beijing/Tianjin as the BosWash megalopolis. In this analogy calling Xinjiang Alaska is pretty reasonable (Uighurs are like the Native Alaskans, I guess), I guess Yunnan is rural Cascadia.
The Beijing area is the center of political power with the most prestigious universities, whereas the Cantonese area was the place with all of the trade and so on, and Shenzhen is the big tech center. It also is true that the immigration to the US West came originally from the Cantonese area.
"Pearl River Delta as like the Bay Area / all of California"
Huh, from my limited reading of historical fiction set in China, my impression of the Pearl River Delta was a semi-tropical hellhole, swampy and full of heat, disease, venomous animals and corruption, where those northerners exiled from the Imperial court were sent to perish from said heat, disease, and corruption.
So more like the popular impression of Florida or Louisiana?
Historically yes but now it’s a big tech center, less nationalistic, open to trans-Pacific trade, and so on.
So... Bay Area hellhole? 😁 (I don't know if that's a worse insult to the Bay Area or the Pearl River)
Certainly that is the traditional view of the Pearl River Delta, but it's also the traditional view of all of South China, where the boundary between North and South is the Huai River, which is north of the Yangtze: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huai_River
Maybe it should be Utah, because Mormons? The Mormon Church has not always had a good relationship with the US government...
This is a kind of text I’d expect translation studies make students write or read in the curriculum. Are there such texts?
I figured I'd ask ChatGPT to do the same thing since my heuristic is "LLMs do translation really well".
The prompt was:
"Please give a 4 paragraph biography of Xi Xinping"
... <it does so, skipping over any controversy>
"Please translate the above biography into an American context. Change Chinese place names into roughly equivalent American place names, change naems of chinese politicians to roughly equivalent American politicians, and change Xi Xinping's name to David Shea, the fictional 44th President of the United States."
... <it does so, but invents some fictional american institutions>
"Rewrite the above biography, but be sure to only refer to real American institutions, not fictional ones."
... <it fixes a few things>
"Rewrite the above, but incorporate even more details of Xi Xinping's life into the americanized version. For example, mention how he became leader for life, and also add in details about his malevolent actions as dictator"
<it complains that it can't do that Dave, but finally relents, giving this:>
"""
It is important to note that in the United States, the President has a term limit of two terms, a President cannot become "leader for life" as the political system is different than that of China. However, I'll try to incorporate more details of Xi Jinping's life into the Americanized version of the biography keeping in mind the limitations of the American political system and laws.
David Shea is an American politician who has served as the President of the United States, since 20XX.
David Shea was born in New York City in 19XX to John Shea, a political leader and former Vice President of the United States. David Shea graduated from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts with a degree in chemical engineering in 19XX, and began his political career in the Democratic Party soon after. He held various positions in the Democratic Party in the states of California and New York before becoming the Governor of California in 20XX and the Governor of New York in 20XX.
In 20XX, David Shea was appointed as a member of the Democratic National Committee and a member of the Democratic Leadership Council, the top decision-making body in the United States. He was also appointed as the Vice President of the United States in 20XX. In 20XX, he was elected as the President of the United States, succeeding Barack Obama.
As the leader of the United States, David Shea has focused on implementing economic reforms, fighting corruption, and strengthening the Democratic Party's control over the government. He has also promoted the "American Dream" of national rejuvenation and modernization. Under David Shea's leadership, United States has increased its global influence through initiatives such as the North American trade agreements. However, David Shea's leadership also marked with criticisms of his increasing control over the media, limiting civil liberties, and cracking down on political dissent. He also faced allegations of human rights violation in his handling of certain domestic issues.
"""
(For some reason my brain scrambled Jason -> David in between when I read this blog post and when I went to ChatGPT, oh well)
Reading this, I thought it was going to end up being created by an AI with a very odd prompt.
Well I'm eight months late to the party but at least I'm the first person to say: does the picture of Jason Shea look suspiciously like Ron DeSantis to anyone else?
I thought it looked a bit like Xi even before the reveal.