Keeping My Eye on the Prize
February 6th, 2009 | View Comments
Two prizes, actually.
The first prize that I’d win from a successful study of Chinese/Japanese would be increased/improved communication with the non-English-speaking family.
The second prize would be this.
I regularly read James Fallows, a Beijing-based writer for The Atlantic. And while I think his posts on China are very thoughtful and well-informed, I would really love to be able to read this and other Chinese stories straight from the source.
Because not all Western journalists do their due diligence when it comes to translations from Chinese. Remember the Olympic scandal about the lip-synching girl in the red dress? And how the real singer had been banned for being chubby and having crooked teeth?
I couldn’t read any of the stories coming out of China when the story broke, but there was a marked difference in the coverage from people who understood Chinese and people who couldn’t that seemed greater than the cultural differences. Eventually I tracked down a video of the oft-quoted radio interview where music director Chen Qigang revealed the lip-syncing:
I won’t claim to have understood it perfectly, but I got most of it and came to virtually the same conclusion as EastSouthWestNorth: the Western media were playing a game of Bad Translation Telephone and turned a relatively low-level ethical issue into a high-profile child-welfare brouhaha.
My problem is that some western media acted to defend the rights of Yang Peiyi by presenting her as a child who was rejected because of her “uneven/crooked/wonky/buck teeth” and “fat/chubby face.” That would be outrageous — if that were truth! In reviewing the primary evidence, I found that none of the principals (general director Zhang Yimou, music director Chen Qigang, the Lin and Yang families, the unnamed Politburo member now pinned on future topdog Ji Jinping, Sarah Brightman, and so on) said anything of the sort. Therefore, my interest in this case is how a convenient heart-tugging story detail gets fabricated and is made into an inflated urban legend without any accountability to anyone anywhere. That is the real story that I want to present here.
It’s better to cut out the middle man.
學中文加油!
P.S. Lest it sound like I’m unfairly disparaging Western journalism, I watched the coverage of the US Presidential election from Taipei, and the Taiwanese reporting was at least equally problematic. The speed of global news these days works in direct opposition to doing your due diligence, especially when you’re also working across a language barrier.
Yvonne posted this on February 6th, 2009 @ 6:59pm in Chinese, Culture Gaps, Translations | Permalink to "Keeping My Eye on the Prize"
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American-born Taiwanese girl who married a Japanese guy. And who forgot about six years' of Spanish grammar and most of the vocab.
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