“With music by Damon Albarn, and imagery by Jamie Hewlett — the duo that brought us the Gorillaz — I am loving BBC Sport’s marketing campaign for the Chinese Olympics.”
Via Drawn.
Archive for the 'Translation' Category
Two calls to sign this petition have been floating around my inbox recently:
Being from Hong Kong, I quickly submitted my name to support this cause. Thoughts stirred in my head: What was the UN doing? Is this a signal for Taiwan? Does this mean Hong Kong will switch to simplified Chinese soon?
Upon further research however, it seems have all been a hoax based upon a chain of sloppy journalism. According to Xiao Zhao who took the time to investigate the matter:
…the rumor was obviously started with a false message from a professor in China, named Chan, Zhang Tai who casually said UN will stop use Traditional Chinese in 2008 to a reporter with a Chinese newspaper in Hong Kong, Oriental Daily in March 2006. The reporter didn’t confirm with UN and just went ahead reporting what professor Chan said. Later on, UN had to announce that there is not abolishment of traditional Chinese in 2008 and UN has never used Traditional Chinese since 1971.
See the full exposee at Xiao Zhao’s blog: A Country Bumpkin Offering Sunshine.
For your viewing pleasure: the homepage of some of the players in The Lost Ring (see previous post).
Mei Hui, China
Diego, Spain
Markus, Germany
Lucie, UK
Monica, Spain
Ariadne, US
Larissa, Brazil
Noriko, Japan
This is an older post from a conversation that happened back in February. But since it’s so interesting, and I did the work of translating it, I thought I’d post it now, months later. Enjoy.
MIT professor Henry Jenkins post on China’s Digital Mavens, which was translated into Chinese and then responded to on Chinese blog OhMyMedia.
Jenkins writes: “Some have adopted judgmental perspectives on this participation gap suggesting that the Chinese take but do not give to the culture of the web.”
OhMyMedia author Maomy argues that from a Western perspective, just looking at the traffic that flows between the Chinese language world and the English language world, this view would be correct, and that on more or less every kind of media exchange, including the Internet, there is an unfavorable balance in cultural flows between China and Europe/North America. Maomy sees this not as a cultural or individual choice but rather as an effect of political and economic power.
But Maomy doesn’t see a “participation gap” when looking at things from a Chinese perspective, where Chinese language content is growing exponentially and all kinds of participatory behaviors–mix and match, fan fiction, and so on–can be seen. He notes things like fan fiction written about Super Girl and Super Boy competitions, and e’gao spoofing on Mop.com. In sum, “Chinese young people are just as excited about contributing their personal creations to the web.”
Maomy then references a blog post by Hecaitou about what Chinese netizens are up to (this is a paraphrase! Too much slang for me and too little time):
I’m so busy. I need to read the latest news on Sina, check the latest shocking bits on Sohu blogs, play QQ and get my little guy dressed, play some online games and get some cool equipment, and find a BitTorrent to download the latest movies.
It’s true, says Maomy, and these are just the kinds of piddly little things that make up the daily life of the Chinese netizen. (And of an American netizen, for that matter). Everyone should have the right to do what they want, read what they want, and spend their time how they want, no matter how boring or worthless it seems to an outsider. Maomy sees this right as a scarce commodity in China, and believes that the value of the Internet for many Chinese lies in its freedom of choice, even with the contraints and limitations that are attached to the Chinese web.
The 6th Chinese Internet Research Conference is themed, “China and the Internet: Myths and Realities.”
It takes place on June 13-14 in Hong Kong. Topics are interesting, and registration only costs 300 HKD.
Was passing by Heathrow and picked up a pamphlet about…
And I checked the website, which said they were co-hosting “over 800 events nationwide spanning art, design, cuisine, culture, science, business, technology, education and sport [that] will capture the imagination and advance the UK public’s understanding of China.”
Their lineup seems pretty impressive, and includes these works:
Above by Chen Shaohua, 1992
Above by Ji Ji, 2006.
There is, in addition, an educational component:
Lastly, they even conjured up a clever marketing ploy: To put paper pigeons in Leicaster Square that act as discount coupons:
For more information, see the HSBC Cultural Exchange website.
Question: Are there similar corporate program(me)s in the US?
This looks like a very cool undertaking. Collabor8 (C8) is an 8 week project that will run from the 28th of April to the 20th of June, bringing together Chinese and Australian designers in a series of online courses and discussions. It’s being put on by the Omnium Research group at the College of Fine Arts. It’s completely free for participants, who should be studying graphic arts in China or Australia. From the website:
Design students from Australia and China will join forces for eight weeks, with project convenors, teachers and special guests worldwide, to work collaboratively within a fully online learning environment.
The aims of C8 include:
• providing design students in Australia and China with the opportunity to work collaboratively on a graphic design problem thereby emulating new trends toward global team-based networks within industry.
• stimulating new ways for designers to work collaboratively across cultural boundaries.
• the development of environmentally friendly and sustainable graphic design for ceramics, textiles, product and environment design.
Dave’s experiment is brilliant. It probably takes this kind of situation to open up new practices across virtual spaces, which even though technically just a click away, tend to seem as far away as Mars.
In a nutshell, he’s got a tutorial for non-Chinese readers to sign up to a Chinese twitter-clone called fanfou, in order to start having a dialogue with Chinese folks who can speak English, regarding the current Tibetan protests. Imagine if conversations get started that will continue into the future.
I’ve signed up for fanfou and got myself a home page, but it’s not intuitive, even for someone who reads Chinese. Dave is now my only fanfou friend, and I used Twifan, which appears to search across multiple microblogging apps in Chinese, to search for tweets on Tibet and 西藏 (there are a lot more using the Chinese characters, but this will not help those who need to communicate in English). It’s not clear what could happen next. Maybe the problem is that it’s 4:30 in the morning on the mainland. We’ll see.
Dave is translating Tibet-related tweets here.
So microblogging and online videos are being brought squarely into the fray. Roland Soong writes about what’s happening on Youtube:
There is a propaganda war going on
YouTube because this is clearly one of the top video news sites. In a
propaganda, you win the share of voice and then you can win the share of
hearts and minds. Therefore, you want the videos that favor your
narrative to dominate. You also want unfavorable videos to be drowned
out. Therefore, you mobilize your people to post as often and as much as
possible….The
point here is that using YouTube to track Tibet developments is low-yield,
high-maintenance work.
If you’re looking for a place to find people to do translation jobs for you, either from English to Chinese, or Chinese to English (or possibly any other languages), one place to check out is 1×1y.com, or 翻心翻译. On the jobs board you can find people and companies who post their prices, number of words per day, and email addresses. To get to some of the data you have to register. And of course, the site is in Chinese, so if you’re not a Chinese speaker you will have to use Google or something else to help you translate. But even so, it should lead you to people who can help you.
Remember the "Numa Numa" song, originally performed by the Moldovan band O-Zone (actual title of song = Dragostea din tei)?
It’s been a while since the song, the MTV and its spoofs were circulated around the internet, but I found a witty animated version today on Tudou that transliterated the Romanian words into Chinese:
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