So I unwisely agreed to “translate” an interview with a Chinese doctor for the magazine this month. Translating simple Chinese about normal everyday topics — fine, no problem, especially with dictionary tools and Chinese coworkers on hand. But a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine talking TCM-speak about how to stay healthy in the summer? Not a chance. Half of what he said doesn’t make one lick of sense in English and they weren’t paying me near enough to justify sweating too much over it anyway. But I want to share one section because it’s a great example of how translation involves much more than words and grammar; translation involves culture, and culturally-defined and culture-bound ideas.

No matter how skilled the linguist is (and I’m not claiming to be skilled or a linguist… or a translator, for that matter), some things simply will not make sense in another language; some things cannot be conveyed outside their native cultural-linguistic context. In order to make the translation have any actual meaning that approximates that of the original, you’d have write paragraphs for each sentence explaining the underlying philosophical assumptions and worldview differences. And even the long explanations still don’t make much sense because they’re talking outside of the worldview of the language that they’re written in.

Here’s part of what I translated:

On Summer Nights Avoid the Wind to Avoid the “Arrows”
Cool wind blowing on summer nights and feels really comfortable, making the night not as hard to bear. Thus, a lot of people sleep with the windows open, and even move their beds to the hallway where it’s drafty. A proverb says, “On summer nights avoid the wind to avoid the arrows”; pathogenic wind can cause many kinds of ailments. In the summer the body’s skin pores expand, and after we fall asleep our immune resistance drops. Additionally, in the latter half of the night the wind is colder, and at this time it’s extremely easy for the body to suffer an invasion of pathogenic wind. Getting wind can lead to a heat cold, facial paralysis, joint pain, sciatic nerve pain, shoulder inflammation, stomach pain, diarrhea, etc. Therefore one should enjoy the cool air in limited amounts and put a blanked over one’s abdomen before sleeping. It’s inadvisable to choose to stay in a drafty room, and one can’t just spread a summer sleeping mat and sleep on a cement floor.

Here’s the Chinese:

夏夜避风如避箭
夏天夜里刮着清爽的风，感觉非常舒适，夜晚也变得不那么难熬了。于是不少人都开窗睡觉，还有的把床搬到居室的过道风口处。俗话说“夏夜避风如避箭”，风邪能引起多种疾病。夏季人体皮肤汗孔张开，入睡后抵抗力下降，加之后半夜的风会更凉，人体此时极易遭受风邪的侵袭。受了风邪，可引发热伤风、面瘫、关节痛、坐骨神经痛、肩周炎、腹痛、腹泻等疾病。因此，纳凉应有节有度，睡前应用一条毛巾被盖好腹部，在室内不宜选择过堂风口之处，不能只铺一张凉席就睡在水泥地上。

“Wind” in Chinese medicine, for example, is very different from what we think of when we say wind in English. Wind (English) still counts as “wind” (TCM), but not vice versa. “Pathogenic wind” and capitalizing “Wind” are two attempts I’ve seen to indicate TCM’s Wind in English. That’s how it goes with much of TCM’s terminology. For example, here’s how the book for explaining TCM to Westerns puts it:

Obviously, the Blood of Chinese medical terminology is not the same as what the West calls blood. Although it is sometimes identifiable with the red fluid of biomedicine, its characteristics and functions are not so identifiable.
…
Blood moves primarily through the Blood Vessels, but also through the Meridians. Chinese medicine does not make a clear distinction between Blood Vessels and Meridians. The Chinese rarely concern themselves about precise inner physical locations — the Stomach Qi “goes upward,” or the Blood “circulates,” but it is seldom entirely clear what internal paths they travel or where, precisely, they go. The physical pathway is less important than the function. This tendency not to fix sites for things is contrary to the Western approach, but it is inevitable with Chinese medical theorizing, which emphasizes process over fixed entities.

We just now had a big discussion in the office with my Chinese coworkers trying to figure out how to translate what I’ve rendered “heat cold” (热伤风) — they looked up a bunch of dictionaries and discussed it and came back with nothing (in TCM, the name of the cold depends on how it is caused, so summer colds and winter colds are different). But reading this interview and hearing my coworkers explain how you get “heat colds” makes me realize that there’s a whole lot more to Chinese people’s apparent fear of good air conditioning than just wanting to save a few bucks.

The article assignment was to give foreigners tips from traditional Chinese medical theory on how to be healthy in the summer. How would you present stuff like the above paragraph to foreigners? What other concepts have you found that are really hard to convey in another language?

Other traditional Chinese medicine stuff:

• Chinese Medicine: Getting a Clue
• Don’t eat that! You’ll get ‘wind’ in your ’stomach’!
• Fire-Cupping & Guasha for Dummies
• Q&A with an American doctor who practices TCM
• Chinese Doctor Visit & Geeking out

You realize just how related the Chinese and English languages aren’t when you come across transliterated words. Using Chinese syllables to pronounce English words often results in something completely unrecognizable and counterintuitive to native English speakers; we could never guess what the original English word was, and, if we’ve studied any Chinese ourselves, we often feel we could come up with alternative transliterations that make much more sense.

“Qiáo ěr” (乔尔) is “Joel”, for example, but “zhōu ōu” is one of a couple alternatives that sound closer to me. “Obama” is “ào bā mǎ” (奥巴马, like “ow! bama”) even though in Chinese you could easily transliterate the vowels almost exactly (“ōu bā mǎ” / 欧巴马). The other day one of my students did this in reverse as a joke. He held up a sign for me to read that said: “Pieces war found.” To a Chinese ear it sounds like “pì shì wǒ fàngde” (屁是我放的), which basically means, “I’m the one who farted.” They thought it was funny and so did I, but only because it requires a really bad Chinese accent to make the connection between those English words and that Chinese sentence. I doubt that a native English who’s never studied Chinese would be able to connect those dots.

Last night a Chinese friend showed me Chinese blog post of unintentionally funny English translations on Chinese signage that included this worksheet of a naughty elementary student. Apparently someone’s harbouring some negative feelings toward his or her English homework:

Not only are they trying to pronounce English with Chinese syllables, but rather than just use meaningless rough phonetic equivalents they deliberately chose certain characters to turn the English words into a Chinese joke (or at least vent some homework frustrations?):

1. bus (bà sǐ / 爸死 / “dad is dead”)
2. yes (yé sǐ / 爷死 / “grandpa is dead”)
3. girls (gē sǐ / 哥死 / “older brother is dead”)
4. miss (mèi sǐ / 妹死 / “little sister is dead”)
5. school (sǐ guāng / 死光 / “dead completely / die off”)
6. pea (pì / 屁 / “fart”)
7. yesterday (yē sǐ tā diē / 噎死他爹 / “Choke to death, his dad”)
8. guess (gāi sǐ / 该死 / “should die” [This is how they usually translate swear words like "darn!" (but stronger) in movie subtitles.])
9. dangerous (dān jiǎo lā shǐ / 单脚拉屎 / “stand on one foot, poop”)
10. five (fèi wù / 废物 / “rubbish / useless (person)”)

1. Hands,hands,two hands. I have two hands (hàn zǐ hàn zǐ, tōu hàn zǐ, ǎn hái lái tōu hàn zǐ / 汉子汉子偷汉子俺还来偷汉子 / “guy guy steal a guy [cheat on your husband], I’m still stealing a guy”)
2. How are you. What is you name (hào ā yóu. wǒ sǐ yòu nèn / 耗啊油，我死又嫩)

The Chinese isn’t all correct and some is totally meaningless; he’s just cramming the characters into the English sounds. But you can see what he’s going for. Someone needs to give these kids a break, or a spanking…

Other Chinese education system stuff:

• The future looks… dysfunctional?
• “Water Brain” — high quality animation depicts the Chinese student experience
• Spinning the grades

I stopped by the bike repair corner for lunch yesterday. I brought my own lunch, and figured I’d better bring something to share, since that’s usually how things work. Mandarin oranges — the kind we eat during Christmas in Vancouver — are really cheap right now, so I brought a bag.

Last time I tried to bring food to share with these guys I didn’t understand enough how to offer food to people in China, especially older people. Last time, no one touched the bowl of cherry tomatoes I’d brought, even though we played Chinese chess with a crowd for at least two hours. I talked it over with my teachers afterward, and it seems like I simply wasn’t forceful enough. You’re supposed to be really insistent and disregard their refusals to the point that they can take some without appearing greedy, or something like that. It’s supposed to look like they’re taking the food because they “have to,” at least that’s how the little daily social ritual goes. It’s hard for foreigners because we end up not knowing which refusals are genuine, and which ones are just for politeness sake.

All that to say, yesterday, with my bag of Mandarin oranges, I was determined to make them eat. Both Mr. Zhang and Mr. Lu were surprisingly resistant, but I didn’t care. And I wouldn’t let them eat just one, either. I think Mr. Zhang caved in first just to give me face, since I obviously wasn’t going to back down. I tossed him the second one so he had to take it. Once Mr. Zhang was stuck with one, he started telling Mr. Lu he ought to take one, which he did, but only ate half.

It was weird that they didn’t eat more; this time I definitely wasn’t too weak when offering. So as usual, I asked about it the next day in class. Turns out it has nothing to do with cultural differences blah blah blah. According to my teacher (and Mr. Lu, Mr. Zhang, and Mr. Guo, who I saw again this afternoon), there’s a melanine-sized national Mandarin orange scandal going on right now. “Everyone knows, except the foreigners,” says my teacher. No one could tell me the details, at least not in a way that I could understand, but apparently down south where they grow the oranges some sort of really tiny insect got into all the oranges and now people are afraid to eat them.

If I can’t see it, or can’t understand it because it’s in another language, it can’t hurt me, right?

Chinese is harder first thing in the morning.

It’s 8:30am on a holiday and we’re sleeping in. The phone rings. Nine times out of ten I’d just let it ring (my college roommate hated this), but this time for some reason I jump out of bed and answer it. It’s someone speaking Chinese. What are they saying? I can feel my heart rate thudding to compensate for my sudden leap-sprint out of the warm covers. I guess (correctly) that it’s one of our neighbour’s daughter-in-laws. She’s arranging a time to meet for something – I can’t tell what. Tuesday, 6pm? Right, got it. Ok. But all that other stuff she’s saying I don’t have a clue. I just woke up! My brain’s not in gear! I say ‘Ok, great, Tuesday, 6pm,’ just make sure I heard that part right, and we hang up. I assume it’s about going to the neighbour’s and making pizza and 饺子 because we’d all talked about that last time we were over there. So that’s what I tell Jessica the phone call was about. And that’s what we plan on.

Turns out it wasn’t at the neighbours’ or even with the neighbours. Their son’s family owns a DIY baking shop and because of our connection I’m writing a Thanksgiving article highlighting it for the local expat magazine’s November edition. They’d phoned to ask us out to dinner, I’d said yes, but Jessica and I were all set to show up at his parents’ place with pizza baking supplies.

The only reason we found out in time was because Jessica just happened to be taking some friends over to their store yesterday afternoon and mentioned looking forward to making pizza with them that night. The daughter-in-law made a confused face, and soon they were laughing about the mix up.

We went out last night to dinner at a cool restaurant called 1928, which recreates a Tianjin feel from that period, complete with traditional forms of entertainment popular in Tianjin. This of course meant me drinking with the boys at one end of the table; good thing there was tons of food and we were there for hours (maybe that’s part of the plan). It’s not a cheap place, and they bought us a gift as well. I’m relieved that so many of our foreign friends bought stuff at their store that afternoon, and that I’ve got the magazine article coming up, or I’d feel like we’re in some guanxi debt.

The phone was ringing as I unlocked the front door and stepped inside. It was ‘Aunty Wang,’ and she wasn’t in the mood to make baby-talk with the not-so-cute foreigner. Jessica had answered the phone, and Auntie Wang tried to discuss the rent hike with her, but Jessica again made her ‘talk’ to me.

‘Aunty Wang’: “We still want you to pay 1200.”

That is totally not fair. Plus, she’s talking really fast, and I hadn’t had time to prepare. I’m scrambling.

Me: “Last time you said 1100.”

A.W.: “Oh, well-”[long string of fast Chinese that I can't catch involving babies and other people who love paying 1200, but the general gist of it all, after I remind her again that they'd already come down to 1100, was that they'll settle for 1100].

Me: “We discussed it while we were waiting for you to phone us, and we feel we can pay 1050.”

That is true. Prices are going up, and we feel 1050 was OK, with strings attached…

A.W.: [Something long and fast about forget 1050 and remember the babies that like to pay 1200 and perhaps might be ready to move in so we're talking about 1100.]

I tell her to hold on a second, and I quickly discuss the next move in English with Jessica.

Me: “OK. We have a list. Some problems. We can pay 1100 after those all get fixed.”

Aunty Wang doesn’t sound impressed.

A.W.: “What are the problems?”

(This is the part where we try to make them pay for raising our rent.)

Me: “The first problem, a stinky smell often comes up from the drain in the bathroom. When we have guests it’s really embarrassing. I tried to fix it my own way, but my way was no use.”

A.W.: “And?”

Me: “The kitchen yángtái (阳台 – North American apartments don’t really have these) windows are ok, but the other windows all leak air. They leak cold wind in the winter and hot wind in the summer…”

She laughs when I say “hot wind” – maybe “hot wind” (热风) means something I don’t know about.

“… and of course you already know the roof leaks. The kitchen has no hot water. The water pressure usually isn’t enough for the gas water heater. And we’re scared of it. And the water dispenser leaks.”

I forget to mention the broken mosquito nets. There’s other stuff I could mentioned, but we’re aiming to get a couple big ones fixed and just need the little ones as bargaining pieces to give up.

A.W.: [She rattles off a whole bunch of fast Chinese which I can't catch. But I'm pretty sure it involves us having the money ready when they come over with the contract this Saturday, and her saying they'll take a look at fix things.]

Me: “After everything is fixed, then we’re able to pay.”

A.W.: “Sure, we’ll fix everything and then you pay us.”

I’m pretty sure she actually said this – though it kind of surprises me. Maybe I’m hearing wrong. We’re only hoping to get one or two of the more important things fixed. I double check, and it sounds like she confirmed it, but I’m definitely not certain.

We arrange a time for them to come over. She says bye but as she’s hanging up I hear her start complaining to her husband, “Aì yà…!” (哎呀; [exclamation!]).

So they’ve forced us to our Plan B. This coming Saturday night will be Round 3, when they come over with the new contract. If I spoke really good Chinese instead of Chinglish, I would have tried to make it all nicer and smoother and leave the option open for them to not raise the rent and not fix stuff. But I speak Chinglish, and that’s just how it is.

Our landlords are trying to raise our monthly rent by 200元 ($28.50). I’m determined to prevent this. But how to negotiate when you’re really still speaking Chinglish?

Ｉ think we won Round One, but that’s probably owing to the element of surprise.

The landlord first phoned one of our Chinese friends who did the original negotiations a year ago. He told them to talk to us. They called Jessica and said, “We want to raise the rent to 1200. Do you agree?” Jessica refused to get into and said they should talk to me. The landlord phoned our Chinese friend again, and this time he told them off (you can do that a lot more in Chinese culture than you can in North America; being rude isn’t as rude here, depending on the relationship). Yesterday they called again when I was out. Jessica again refused to discuss it, and told them to phone back at 8:00pm when I’d be home (as per our plan).

So last night I was waiting for their call, and had everything I wanted to say looked up in the dictionary and written down. We have to try and find a way to say “No” that is nice enough but doesn’t give them anything to work with. It also helps that they can’t bust out their super-negotiation powers on us because we don’t understand most of what she says anyway. She phoned, and after patronizing me with a slower-than-toddler-speed greeting (“Haaave. Youuu. Eeea-ten. Yet?”; 你吃完了吗? – they know Jessica’s Chinese is better than mine, plus I think they sense that Jessica would be more likely to agree to a rent increase) it went something like this:

‘Aunty Wang’ the Chinese Landlord: “We want to raise the rent to 1200. Did you discuss it?”

Me: “Yes, we discussed it. We really like living in this apartment and the neighbourhood is really great. Even though our neighbours all say 1000 per month is too much for this apartment, we think 1000 a month is OK.” (Take that, Landlord!)

This surprises her, and she laughs, I think similar to the way grown-ups laugh at primary school kids when they try to act grown-up. Then she says something about rent going up all over the city, and some other stuff I don’t catch.

Me: “But that has to do with the Olympics, doesn’t it?”

A.W.T.C.L.L.: “It has no relation to the Olympics.”

I deliberately leave some awkward dead air, forcing her to say something and wonder if I understand her. She repeats their intention to raise the rent.

Me: “We aren’t able to pay more. We are still in school and don’t have jobs.”

She repeats what I’ve been saying to her husband. It takes me few seconds to realize she’s not talking to me.

A.W.T.C.L.L.: “How about 1100?”

Me: “We still aren’t able to pay more. We are still in school and don’t have jobs.”

A.W.T.C.L.L.: “How about you two discuss it and then give us call?”

Me: “We already discussed it.”

A.W.T.C.L.L.: “But how about you two discuss it and then give us call?”

Me: “We already discussed it. Our situation is the same as before. We’re still in school and don’t have jobs.”

She says something about someone discussing and then someone giving someone a phone call. but I’m not sure who’s waiting for whom to call.

Me: “So, you’ll discuss it and then give us a call?” She confirms. “OK, I’ll wait for your call.”

I have no doubt that “Auntie Wang”‘s negotiation skills exceed my own; she’s been haggling prices longer than I’ve been alive. But if they manage to wrestle us into actually discussing the price of an increase, I have a list of major and minor repairs to the apartment to unload on them, half of which I hope to eventually stick them with before we pay any increase. But I’m hoping we never have to go there. Haha… we’ll see.

P.S. – I should mention that the dialogue above would be more accurate if I riddled my sentences with grammar mistakes. We ‘know’ how to say all that stuff, but pulling stuff out of your head in the middle of a discussion isn’t the same as writing it on paper in your homework. We can say that stuff accurately on a good day, and I can still mess some of it pretty good on a bad day.

My dad told me once how he went to dinner at a family’s home in Vancouver who were recent immigrants from Africa or Albania (I forget). For dessert, they served up dishes of frozen juice mix – the kind that comes frozen in the cardboard can that you’re supposed to mix with water – like it was ice cream. I can’t remember if my dad said anything or not. He may have just eaten it like everything was normal.

Just this week a fellow language student couple told me how they did the same thing when they had some of the teachers over for dinner recently. For dessert, they served a plate of uncooked 汤圆 (“soup spheres,” also called 元宵), not knowing that you’re supposed to boil them. They’re little sweet dumplings made out of glutinous rice flour, which, when they’re cooked, are gooey white doughy balls with sweet stuff inside, usually red bean paste. Uncooked usually means frozen. One of the teachers got a big surprise when she bit down, but then she told them and they cooked them and a good time was had by all.

We were planning to eat some tonight, which is what made me think to write about it, and I was going to show you a picture of what they look like cooked, except I cooked them wrong, the insides all fell out, and we ended up with a rice-flavoured blob of slime.

Just a simple anecdote of how easy it is to ‘not get it’ when you live elsewhere. Makes me have a lot more sympathy for the real immigrants back in Vancouver!

The first days back in class after a break are always a little rough. Mr. Lù and Mr. Sòng made it a little more interesting on what they probably didn’t realize was Boxing Day by placing the still bleeding head of an as-yet-unidentified former animal on the electrical utilities box near the entrance to our complex. The rest of the just-barely-dead carcass was in a plastic shopping bag on the back of Mr. Lù‘s bike.

I thought it was a dog, but they said no, it’s an animal we don’t have in America called a pāo zi (I’m 90% certain that’s what they said). I’ve asked around, and some Chinese friends came up with páo zi (狍子), which is some kind of deer, but since when are deer carnivores? (warning: the photo‘s kind of gross). Mr. Lù bought the whole thing at the market around the corner for 50 kuài (about $6.75). He said he’s going to make stew. One person thought it might be a 黄鼠狼 (“yellow-rat-wolf” a.k.a. weasel?), but there was disagreement over whether or not you can eat those (the southerner stated matter-of-factly: “If it’s an animal, you can eat it”). Take a look at the photo and the links on the Chinese words (linked to google images) and tell us what you think it is/was.

It finally snowed this morning! We had a white Christmas, if you count a week of near-impenetrable fog. Now it’s after lunch, dry, and sunny, but the snow sucked a lot of the pollution out of the air (it made the sky a weird yellow colour for an hour or so today).

Jessica is sick, and has been for a while now. There’s this nasty bug going around that makes people cough all night for two weeks. One local said it’s just because it hasn’t snowed that everyone is getting sick (because the snow will clear the air of all the pollution). Jessica has medicine (both kinds!) and is getting better.

We just had two days off from class for of Christmas, which included a Boxing Day Christmas party with friends, and next week we get three for New Years, so we’re going to take it easy for a little while and have some fun. Maybe run around town for a bit. All these days off make coming back to class hard, because spending all this holiday time with foreigners in English takes your brain out of Chinese gear, and getting back into gear always takes a bit of effort.

Ugh. This post isn’t so much about (not) eating lunch as it is about the hazards of being illiterate, hungry, and having only limited oral language skills at your disposal.

I like variety. I like to try new things. On long road trips I keep my finger on the Seek button, stopping on whatever radio station is playing music I’ve never heard before (ha, Jessica hates this). It’s the same with cheap food. But today, it backfired.

Weekday lunches here are usually street food or the next closest thing. They cleared off all the street vendors near the library office where I study in the afternoons, but there are still plenty of hole-in-the-wall places where lunch will cost you less than a dollar. This week I’d already had a string of good luck, stumbling upon three new dishes worth adding into the regular lunch rotation. It helps that the longer we study, the more the street signs slowly come into focus and we can start to read parts of the menus.

Jessica, Chuck, and I hit the street at lunch time wondering what to eat. I noticed a doorway listing some kind of dish that had “roast” (烤) and “spicy” (辣) in the name, among other characters, and that was more than enough to warrant giving it a shot. So Chuck and Jessica headed up the road for bāo zi (包子) and má là miàn (麻辣面) while I ducked inside. They had a BBQ rack! These long (sometimes several feet) skinny BBQs have been in short supply the last few months, and they usually have some of the cheapest and best roasted-on-a-stick street food around. I talked to the couple inside: they had a table full of loaded skewers, and they mentioned “sheep soup” (羊汤). I ordered two chicken skewers and sheep soup, all of which came hot in plastic bags in about a minute.

The three of us returned to the office where lunch usually doubles as oral Chinese practice with the office staff (except for Chuck, who’s sort of an ABC). That’s when I discovered my lunch’s true identity. Now, it’s one thing when you’re served dinner as a guest and you eat whatever it is without any improper hesitation. It’s another thing when you’re buying your own lunch and what you thought was sheep meat turns out to be diced sheep digestive tract, and the chicken meat that you then thought would make your lunch not a total loss turns out to be chicken skin on a stick. No meat, just dimply fatty skin-on-a-stick. Fifteen minutes later I was back outside telling all this to the fried noodle lǎo bǎn (老板), explaining that most Westerners don’t go for stomach parts and skin, and he laughed and told the customers eating next to him while he took my order.

Moral of the story is what everyone at our lunch table, except me, already knew: “sheep soup” (羊汤) and “sheep meat soup” (羊肉汤) are not the same thing. That, and wherever you live, if you want to have a clue you have to learn the language!

Ha. Last night I accidentally bought a bag of MSG instead of sugar. It had weird looking sugar grains. We didn’t find out until Jessica put it in her coffee this morning. That’s what illiteracy will get you in China: MSG-flavoured coffee first thing in the morning.

Last night I went for an after-dinner walk with Mr. Song, and we found a sidewalk calligrapher. It was too dark and the video quality is horrible, but it’s still kind of cool. Now that I know where these guys go I’ll get better shots next time. The music in the background is from a ladies’ exercise group a few meters away.

The guy tried to get me to write something, which amused all the on-lookers. Put on the spot, I wrote, “我爱中国” (I love China), mostly because it’s easy and one of the first things that popped into my head with everyone waiting. It was funny because as I was writing I could hear them laughing about my stroke order, “He’s writing wrong!” I was under pressure, people! =) I’m gonna think up something funny to write next time, just in case.