Decoding China

Decoding China

Leading publisher builds a multilingual Wikipedia on Chinese terminology By Li Nan

Cai Lijian, a senior translator and a member of the translation team for the China keywords program, gives a lecture on the translation of political discourse in Beijing on July 21

‘It might sound depressing but the truth must be told: the West knows little about China,” said Thorsten Pattberg, a German philosopher and cultural critic. Thus, he called for the nation to invent more original Chinese terminology to enlarge the intellectual property pool.

Sun Jingxin, a senior editor with the Beijing-based Center for International Communication Studies, echoed Pattberg’s view. As he put it, “Inventing and communicating Chinese concepts, undeniably, is a crucial step to heal China’s Achilles’ heel in presenting itself to the world.”

Though China has tried to project its voice to the world in recent decades, few made-in-China terminologies are widely accepted in the West. “The only one I can come up with is ‘paper tiger,’ which was invented long ago,” recalled Cai Lijian, a senior translator working for the UN Secretariat. “paper tiger” is a literal English translation of zhilaohu, which refers to something that appears threatening but is unable to withstand challenge. It became well known in the West after Mao Zedong (1893-1976) used the expression during an interview with American journalist Anna Louise Strong in 1946.

“Many Chinese concepts, especially those concerning political and diplomatic discourse on the governance of China, are difficult for non-Chinese speakers to understand because of an imbalance of communication between China and the rest of the world,” wrote Su Changhe, a professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Shanghai-based Fudan University, in the Oriental Morning Post.

To compound matters, awkward uses of the phrases may discourage the audience. Therefore, an accurate and readable translation of Chinese terminologies is paramount.

An easy access

The China keywords program, a multilanguage, multimedia platform for explaining essential expressions about contemporary China, is expected to shed light on the aforementioned problem.

The platform was set up in December 2014 by the China Academy of Translation, a subsidiary of the China International Publishing Group (CIPG). By July 2016, it had consisted of 230 Chinese catchphrases and their translations in nine languages including English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Japanese. The word pool is expected to be enlarged soon to include Indonesian, Vietnamese, Turkish, Italian, and Kazakh versions.

New concepts, approaches, and policies concerning the governance of China, which have emerged since the 18th Communist Party of China (CPC) National Congress in 2012, constitute the keyword pool. They are selected from the latest government reports, articles by top Party and state leaders, and particularly President Xi Jinping’s speeches. The keywords are categorized into 20 groups, such as socialism with Chinese characteristics, the Chinese dream, the 13th Five-Year Plan, and so on.

The program targets global political parties and leaders, think tanks, media outlets and research institutes. It also aims to provide references to Chinese diplomats and officials from departments of international communication. When questioned on why fragmented phrases were chosen to present China, Yang Ping, Secretary General of the China Academy of Translation, told Beijing Review, “As mobile reading becomes popular, fragmented reading materials are demanded by readers.”

But in Sun’s opinion, China keywords is more than the pooling of terminologies. “It’s expected to be a Wikipedia on China’s governance,” he claimed.

Recoding challenges

“Translating the solemn, formal, standardized political discourse into brief and vivid terms is a convoluted process,” Sun explained.

To offer accurate and readable translations, CIPG has recruited a dozen of foreign editors and more than 30 leading experts to identify, research and explain conceptual structures of the Chinese political system, with the translation of each keyword undergoing at least four roundsof modification.

Cai is a member of the translation team. “It’s not easy to recode Chinese expressions because direct equivalents cannot always be found in the target language,” he told Beijing Review.

For example, abbreviated slogans with numbers, which are rarely used in English, are commonplace in Chinese documents. Aside from a minority of China hands, few non-Chinese speakers will have any idea about Sige Quanmian, literally meaning “Four Comprehensives.”

In fact, Sige Quanmian refers to a fourcomponent national governance strategy first proposed by President Xi in December 2014. This strategy concerns finishing the process of building a moderately well-off society in all aspects, pursuing an expanded in-depth reform agenda, implementing an all-round framework for promoting the rule of law, and launching an all-out effort to enforce strict Party discipline.

“Translating political discourse does not mean that we must follow a word-for-word approach,” said Cai, believing such recoding to be unfeasible, especially in view of the chasm in difference between Chinese and English at both the semantic and syntactic level. Instead of “Four Comprehensives,” Cai prefers recoding Sige Quanmian as “the Four-Pronged Strategy,”which sounds more natural in his opinion.

Cai also warned against imposing peculiar source language features on the translation if they are out of place and serve no useful purpose. Take repetition for example, which has become a rhetoric phenomenon in Chinese, helping to draw parallels and underline the main concept. Yet repetition is disfavored in English. As Cai puts it, “In our effort to faithfully recode a message in another language, we are not expected to ditch target language conventions.”

Another challenge is maintaining a balance between accuracy and creativity, according to Cai. He dismisses the notion that accuracy and creativity are mutually exclusive. Instead, he believes accuracy cannot be achieved without creativity. “No effective cross-cultural transfer of information can take place if we do not resort to our creativity to rearrange target language expressions in a clever, lucid manner,” he added.

Translators participating in the Chinese keywords program discuss issues at a workshop in Beijing in December 2015

Reaching the audience

To reach a greater audience, the keywords have been regularly published in Beijingbased magazines including Beijing Review, ChinAfrica, China Today, People’s China and China Pictorial since June. The first volume of China Keywords paperback, published by the Beijing-based New World Press, is set to debut at the Beijing International Book Fair this August.

In addition, the glossary is available on news portal China.org.cn and social media such as Facebook, Twitter and WeChat. Since July, nearly 20 keywords have been posted on Twitter, reaching a community of more than 450,000 users. Among them, “community with a shared future” is the most frequently viewed phrase, after being reached 100,000 times, according to the China Academy of Translation.

Now, the program team is considering the initiation of a crowd-translating campaign online, hoping to attract netizens from home and abroad to select, edit and translate their favorite terminologies collectively.

However, some experts believe there is far to go before Chinese terminologies become global buzzwords. “As a long-term project, the China keywords platform is still in its infancy,” said Sun, adding that presenting the big picture of China with fragmented keywords remains a jigsaw puzzle for its initiators to solve.

Copyedited by Dominic James Madar

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