Beware a Xinhua story that revolves around a new government policy flanked by quotation marks. This mantra should be repeated by every foreign sub-editor who passes through the plain brick arch on Xuanwumen Xidajie that is Xinhua’s front gate. Often these phrases are a nightmare to translate from Chinese without displaying the clumsiness of an uncoordinated elephant in a small newsroom. Leaving the phrase how you find it can also come back to haunt the conscience. The trouble is, a Chinese government policy in quotation marks can become a coined phrase passed down through history.
Ok, enough hyperbole, but the first time I actually realised a significance to my job was about a month after I started, around the time of last year’s parliamentary sessions, when I was introduced to “The socialist concept of honour and disgrace”. Ah, Ba Rong Ba Chi - or Eight Honours, Eight Disgraces - that guide to modern living to embarrass even the most deluded of lifestyle gurus. Here it is in its full glory as translated by Xinhua:
– Love the country; do it no harm
– Serve the people; never betray them
– Follow science; discard superstition
– Be diligent; not indolent
– Be united, help each other; make no gains at other’s expense
– Be honest and trustworthy; do not sacrifice ethics for profit
– Be disciplined and law-abiding; not chaotic and lawless
– Live plainly, work hard; do not wallow in luxuries and pleasures.
At the time of the advent of the Ba Rong Ba Chi, I had received little incentive to do anything more than change some grammar and chuck in a couple of new words (I know better now …). Bored one lonely evening, in a defiant act of flippancy (if there could be such a thing) I tossed “amalgamation” into the definition of this fine new concept. The next issue of the Guardian Weekly read:
The propaganda machine has been quick to spread Hu Jintao’s gospel. According to the state-run Xinhua News Agency, the socialist concept of honour and disgrace “is a perfect amalgamation of traditional Chinese values and modern virtues”.
Ah, the power! Oh, the embarrassment! The Guardian had labelled me a propagandist. To think I moved to Beijing to freelance. So, it was with great trepidation that I received a story last week about the government’s new approach to tackling crime. It would now be a rather wordy “Combining Severe Punishment With Leniency” policy as opposed to the “Strike Hard” policy – a punchy little number that had been in place since the early eighties.
The Ministry of Publicity sometimes holds meetings with Xinhua to come up with set translations in English of tricky Chinese phrases to try to feed the world palatable sentences. Sometimes, the Information Office of the State Council translates officials’ work reports and that translation becomes “official”. But on this occasion, the translation seemed to be up to me. Which is a problem given my Chinese is probably only sufficient for a Mr Men translation.
I have to admit I agonised over it for about half an hour. Although nowhere near the same scale I didn’t want to make a “Three Represents” grammatical cock-up. One can only assume the foreign editor on duty during the 1990s had a hangover the day that theory landed on his desk and simply couldn’t be arsed. Once a phrase like this is written, it is immortalized in the Xinhua database and copied until the end of the Republic .. I mean time. In the end I went for the “balancing severe punishment with leniency” policy. Yep, changed one word. Suggestions welcome. Personally, I’m not sure it’s going to catch on anyway.
These kinds of phrases often come back to haunt governments anyway. “Great Leap Forward”, “Cultural Revolution”, “Back To Basics“. I reckon if Tony Blair’s catchphrase, “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, had been invented by Xinhua and landed on my desk, I would have laughed it out of the building.
Whatever happened to Ba Rong, Ba Chi in the English-language media? The posters in Chinese (those that haven’t been ripped down by foreigners wanting a little memento from their stay in China) are still around and apparently a guy still sings a song about them on television in a Shanxi dialect. But I haven’t had the pleasure of editing anything about it for months. Surely, it wasn’t considered an international PR disaster. I remember that proud day (actually it was some time last March) when I got my hands on a credit-card-sized red and yellow piece of paper adorned with the Ba Rong Ba Chi. One of the senior editors gave it to me, mocking it as he outstretched his hand. He came back into my office ten minutes later to make sure I wouldn’t tell anyone he had been the one to give me the card. Even then, it was a source of embarrassment. The speculation goes Hu Jintao never intended the Ba Rong Ba Chi to be put on such a pedestal. Rather, his supporters wanted something to push Jiang Zemin’s Three Represents ideology further into the background. But the trouble with that is the “Three Represents” can be regarded as a theory while the Ba Rong Ba Chi is just common sense dressed up in Ten Commandment language.
JBS | 20-Mar-07 at 3:38 pm | Permalink
Howdy partner, holy crap you’re good!
Will | 21-Mar-07 at 9:32 am | Permalink
I always thought the “Three Represents” had its own poetry. Like the “Friendlies”, for instance, the phrase could never have sprung full-formed from the mouth of a native English speaker. Vladmir Sklovsky wrote in his Theory of Prose that the power of art was to make the familiar world strange. These rigid phrases, passed along from newspaper to newspaper like unwanted fruitcake, force a reader to carefully evaluate not only the potential meaning of the slogan itself, but of the language which he speaks and understands without otherwise thinking.
I know translations of this type can mangle the fluency of the original Chinese (or does it all sound as stilted in Mandarin?), but I always attributed such phrases to an instinctive poetic synergy between the original writer and the the translator. I am especially delighted when numerical metaphors, so deeply rooted in Chinese literature, show up in government proclamations. As a Soviet officer once told a subordinate, “I like music, especially the drum.”
duzhe | 22-Mar-07 at 11:29 am | Permalink
Such an interesting blog!