Cookie, Cracker or Biscuit - 饼干, 饼干 or 饼干

My dislike of (American) cookies roots in the misrepresentation of the word.  When I was a kid, I liked certain 饼干 (pronounced as: bǐng gān), which I learned that in (British) English it is called a biscuits.  In high school, we suddenly switched from British English to American English and I learned that a piece of 饼干 is now a cookie.

However, once I landed in the US and had my chances to taste cookies, they turned out to be of utterly different species.  They were too huge, too soft, too rich, and too strongly flavored.  They were nothing like of my 饼干 childhood and I was often offended by their audaciousness of masquerading as cookies.

Therefore, I started to look for biscuits, properly named by the proper English speakers, I naïvely thought.

Then the biscuits I encountered in the US were even more outrageously false.  First, I thought it highly strange to be on restaurant menu.  Encouraged by my friends, I ordered this biscuits, and again, they were not those 饼干 I thought to be.  They were even cooked and warm!  They were fluffy, easy to crumple, rich and flavorful and even come with some rich sauce, typically called gravy.  Alas, US didn't have real cookies.

Then, later, I encountered something when I started to go to galleries - cheese and crackers.  Those small, thin, and crisp crackers turned out to be the 饼干 I'd been searching for all those years!

Whey wouldn't Americans call them what they were - cookies!

This is very confusing and it had ruined my appetite for American cookies forever.

Below is the screen shot of a Google automatic translation, from English to Chinese, of biscuit, cookie and cracker, and you can understand why these three things confuse a native Chinese speaker so much:



So, how on earth can one differentiate one from another of these three similar but utterly different items?  I resorted to Wikipedia.  It told me that:

A biscuit is a baked, edible, and commonly flour-based product. The term is used to apply to two distinctly different products in North America and the Commonwealth Nations.

• In the United States it is a small, soft, leavened bread, somewhat similar to a scone. A Southern regional variation on the term, beaten biscuit, is closer to the British form.
• In Commonwealth English, it is a small and hard, often sweet, baked product that would be called either a cookie or a cracker in the United States, and either a biscuit or a cookie in Canada. Biscuits in the British Isles may be savoury (savoury biscuits are often referred to as "crackers") or sweet, such as chocolate biscuits, ginger nuts, custard creams or the Nice biscuit.

American biscuit (left) and British biscuits (right)
Lou Sander

In the United States and Canada, a cookie is a small, flat, baked treat, usually containing fat, flour, eggs and sugar. In most English-speaking countries outside North America, the most common word for this is biscuit; in many regions both terms are used, while in others the two words have different meanings. A cookie is a plain bun in Scotland, while in the United States a biscuit is a kind of quick bread similar to a scone. In the United Kingdom, a cookie is referred to as a biscuit, although some types of cookies maintain this name, such as the American-inspired Maryland Cookies, which are also sold there. In South Africa they are called biscuits, and the word cookie refers to cupcakes.

A British supermarket-brand Nice biscuit Public Domain (PD)	Assorted cookies Public Domain (PD)	American cookies Jonathunder

A cracker is a baked good typically made from grain flour dough and usually manufactured in large quantities. Crackers (equivalent to savory biscuits in the United Kingdom) are usually flat, crisp, small in size (usually 3 inches or less in diameter) and are made in various shapes, though are commonly round or square.

Crackers with herring and garlic sauce.
Giovanni JL from Singapore


Well, snack time.  Biscuits? Crackers? Cookies? Anyone?

Is It Name's Day or Birthday? Depending on If It's Chekhov

Last Friday, I attended a very engaging performance of "Three Sisters".  It was publicized as a new version by Sarah Ruhl, based on a literal translation by Elise Thoron of Anton Chekhov's play.

There has been a trend to stage seminal plays with "new versions".  This concept of new versions often baffled me.  After having attended several performance of such new versions, I realized that some free adaptations were involved, often remove some historical and cultural references not imminently familiar to average American theatergoers.  It often succeeded in making the plots and dialogues easier to follow, in exchange, sacrificing the richness of the details and subtleties.

Ruhls' version was elegant and eloquent - however, a sense of innate melancholy was shortchanged by melodramatic and some Americanized jokes made no sense in Chekhov's imperial Russia.

I am limiting my discussion here to one point.  The first act of the play took place on a special day.  Which day was it? Depending on if you are asking Chekhov or Ruhl.  Chekhov would tell you that it took place in the youngest sister Irina's "name day" while Ruhl told us that it was Irina's birthday.



One can argue that the change was not a big deal.  In a way, it didn't change the trajectory of the plot and pacing, and would not confuse audience who are not familiar with the concept of name day or name's day, it indeed warrants little objection.

However, it affected the characterization of Irina.  She chimed joyously how happy she was on that day since she got up.  Here, if we knew it was her name day, we would have understood that she felt especially blessed by her patron saint on that special day, and there was a larger celebration and meaning to that day - a day of her particular blessing, a second birth, and a connection to holy purpose and mystery.

When we sat in the audience, hearing her chirping about her joy in her birthday, it was hard not to feel narcissistic streak in her, which Chekhov didn't not give to her characteristics.

Another well-known name day party in Russian literature is Tatiana's in Eugene Onegin by Alexandr Pushkin.

Therefore, this small deal not not really too small, and I, once again, champion a strict literal translation.

Coca Cola, Mercedes-Benz and Yosemite

Coca Cola, Mercedes Benz and Yosemite - what do they have in common?

For Chinese speakers, they represent the examples of best translation.  The Chinese translations for Coca Cola is 可口可乐 (pronounced as: ke-kou-ke-le), which means delicious and cheering.  The truncated form Coke was simple 可乐 (ke-le), cheering.



Most Chinese speakers don't know what Mercedes is but they now Benz.  The translation of Mercedes-Benz, at least in mainland China, usually leaves Mercedes out and Benz is called 奔驰 (pronounced as: ben-chi), meaning racing.  Some translations do keep Mercedes, which was simply a phonetic transliteration (梅塞德斯, pronounced as: mei-sai-de-si) with no special meanings.



Yosemite in Chinese is 优山美地 (pronounced as: you-shan-mei-di), which means superior mountain(s) and beautiful field(s).



I have discussed many times regarding what constitutes good translations.  To me, the full meaning of the original language is the essential.  As for brands, a phonetic proximity is important as well.  Besides those, if the translated language can add extra layers of wonderful meanings to merchandise brands, then the translations reach sublimity.

Translating "Les bonnes sœur"

Benjamin Ivry, who has translated many books from the French by authors including Gide, Verne and Balthus, wrote a review of a new translation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary by Lydia Davis. Mr. Ivry's review was very interesting and full of insight. However, I strongly disagree with one of his comments.

He stated that "most bizarrely, a French term for nuns (les bonnes sœur) is repeatedly Englished as 'the good sisters.'"

A translation needs to be faithful and also need to convey not only the apparent meaning of the original language, but the cultural and historical subtleties as well. Therefore, "the good sisters" are far preferable here to "nuns" which failed to convey that in that period in France, people referred to nuns as the good sisters. Telling modern day English readers this piece of information can be helpful but it belongs to the footnotes. A translator is different from annotator.


Young Man, Book and Flowers © Matthew Felix Sun

More on Fidelity of Translations

John M Morrison wrote for Guardian on how dramatic works were given cavalier treatment on stages by the translators who often rewrote, Lost in translation: why have we declared war on foreign dramatists?

Whatever will these silly foreigners get up to next? Did you hear about the Chinese version of Hamlet that gave the play a happy ending? Surely we all know you can't rewrite the classics, and my Chinese example is imaginary. But British theatre commits artistic assault and battery of this kind on an increasingly regular basis. The victims, sprawled in the wings with their scripts torn to shreds are invariably playwrights who had the misfortune not to write in English.

The latest example is Heinrich von Kleist, who has been dead for nearly 200 years, but that's no excuse for the version of his Prince of Homburg at London's Donmar Warehouse. At the end, the audience sees the prince dying in a hail of bullets as the Elector of Brandenburg, a prototype fascist dictator clad in black, supervises his execution by firing squad. Unfortunately, this is the exact opposite of what happens in Kleist's original, in which the final scene is a mock execution. The Donmar's rewrite man, Dennis Kelly, has turned the play on its head, substituting a scene of superficial drama for the original's dream-like ambiguity. For me it spoiled the evening. As Michael Billington exclaimed at the end of his review, "Oh Kleist!".

Germans aren't the only casualties in this war on foreign dramatists; eminent Russians have also been run over by the National Theatre juggernaut.

One can argue that in the theatre anything goes, particularly when the author is safely dead and long out of copyright. But one of the principles that marks off theatre from film is respect for the artistic integrity of the author's text, even when he or she is no longer around to complain.

Treating foreign works in this cavalier fashion sends the same message as the decline of language teaching in schools; we are increasingly a monoglot culture, treating classic plays in other languages as mere raw material for our own theatre.

I remembered that years ago, I had an argument with a friend on if Chinese people can understand Shakespeare. I thought he was being dismissive when he claimed that Chinese could not get Shakespeare. I told him that the very best Shakespeare theater experiences I ever had was a magnificent King Lear in Manchurian Shenyang, China in 1980s. I was also pride in having read all the dramatic works by Shakespeare. Or sort of. At the time I was reading him, I was in middle school therefore I only read translation done in 1930s!

Chinese can get the essence and spirit of Shakespeare for sure but much of the poetry would have lost in translation for sure, no matter how faithful the translator had been.

One thing I was sure was that that particular translator did not dare to tinker with the dramatic contour. In general, the quality of translation in then China was good. The proof was that almost all translated literature didn't read like written in colloquial Chinese. The structure of sentences were maintained as much as possible. Reading translated literature were usually treated as serious lessons other than entertainment the British and American reader or theater goers demand now.

I have repeated fretted over the bad translations we got in my previous blogs: Scrupulous Germans? Nein!, Art of Translation, Lost in Translation, and The Arabian Nights, Fairy Tales of Brothers Grimm and Anderson.

It is a sad fact that readers of translated literature didn't get our respect, with few exceptions such as the wonderful translator team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

My advise: Try to understand great works in its original languages, otherwise, prepare to be fooled.

Limelight © Matthew Felix Sun
www.matthewfelixsun.com

Scrupulous Germans? Nein!

Reading Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in German translation, Stolze und Vorurteil by Ilse Krämer, I was struck by an observation that even the German translators are not scrupulous in fidelity as they ought to be.

I made such discovery in Chapter 5 when "Mein Gott" was uttered by Mrs. Bennet. I don't remembered that she cried out "My God" in Pride and Prejudice, therefore I compared the translation to the version I have and then with an online version, and discovered more sloppiness and laziness, and even unforgivable incorrectness.

Below are a few examples from the first five chapters alone. Jane Austen wrote short chapters. For such a short novel, she divided the texts into sixty-one chapters.

In Chapter 3, in the ball, Mr. Darcy commented on Elizabeth Bennet as "tolerable", yet the German translation gave us "leidlich hübsch", namely "tolerably pretty". It is correct, in essence of its meaning, but not the way of expression. This was repeated in Chapter 5, when the Bennet women and Lucas women discussed the ball.

The example of a grave incorrectness is at the beginning of Chapter 3. English version says: "To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love; and very lively hopes of Mr. Bingley's heart were entertained."

German: "Wer gerne tanzt, ist schon auf halbem Wege, sich zu verlieben. Die kühnsten Hoffnungen in Mrs. Bennets Herzen fanden Nahrung."

Jane Austen described a general excitement amongst Misses and Mrs. Bennet in the hope of winning Mr. Bingley's heart. The German translation made us believe that it is a hope in Mrs. Bennet's heart we are witnessing being stirred.

However correct this particular translated sentence in broad stroke, it is utterly wrong.

Scrupulous Germans? Nein!


Reading © Matthew Felix Sun

The Arabian Nights, Fairy Tales of Brothers Grimm and Anderson

Last weekend, in a bookstore, I saw a new translation of Arabian Nights but decided not to investigate further. I have read it when I was in elementary or middle school, in Chinese translation. Several year ago, I tried to read it in English but gave it up soon.

It was not due to the qualities of either Chinese or English translation; rather, it was due to the clear images my original read conjured up and most crucial, the atmosphere it generated, which was so vivid and strong that no other way of telling the story (other version of translation, or even the original if I could read it) could bring out the magic I originally felt. The rather strange turn of phrases (Chinese translators tend to keep the original language structure, and worry less about being in idiomatic Chinese) and the very words used in those books were rather new and they were part of the magic. Probably the first time heard of witches, slaves, princes, gingerbread, swans, nettles, vampires were the time I read about them in those fantastic stories. The magic and fantasy were firmly espoused to the words I read.

There are several other books fell into this category, most of them were book I read when I was very young and have much to do magical elements, such as Fairy tales by Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson and Klyrov's Fables.

Other books I read in both Chinese and English don't pose such trouble for me -- I enjoyed reading Jane Austin, Leo Tolstoy, and Honoré de Balzac in both Chinese and English. As for Shakespeare, Chinese translation was only an approximation, and my new read of English version supplanted my old memory easily. English translations of several classical Chinese novels won't do either, such as Red Chamber's Dream - the English translation, however faithful and artful, won't convey the full multiple-layered meanings it contains.


Red Sail © Matthew Felix Sun

Overcoming Language Barrier - chinaSMACK.com

chinaSMACK was created to translate regularly popular and quirky (if not outright scandalous) news and phenomena from China’s ever-vibrant and ever-teeming BBS discussion forums, which has been more and more popular.

chinaSMACK helped to penetrate into the great mystery of modern Chinese social and cultural fog by translating original Chinese contents. chinaSMACK is arguably the first English-language blog about China featuring translated Chinese internet pop-culture phenomena, putting the thoughts and comments of actual Chinese netizens front and center.

chinaSMACK has been growing fast and it claims an average of 7,000 visitors per day.

Art of Translation

Recently, I had certain discussions with friend regarding what constructs as a good translation.

Since I'm reading Italienische Reise by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, I picked out the Penguin Classics English version translated by W.H. Auden as well.

Goethe wrote:

14. September

Der Gegenwind, der mich gestern in den Hafen von Malcesine trieb, bereitete mir ein gefährliches Abenteuer, welches ich mit gutem Humor überstand und in der Erinnerung lustig finde.

My direct translation reads:

"The headwind, which drove me yesterday into the port of Malcesine, prepared me a dangerous adventure, which I endured with good humor and in the memory find amusing."

W.H. Auden translated the same sentence as:

"The contrary wind which drove me yesterday into Malcesine harbour involved me in a dangerous adventure from which, thanks to keeping my temper, I emerged victorious and which highly amuses me in retrospect."

Victorious was clearly Auden's interpretation of what Goethe felt but didn't write. I actually don't believe Goethe felt victorious at all.

Interestingly, W.H. Auden wrote in the introduction to the Penguin Classics version:

"A translator, that is to say, has to assume that his readers cannot and never will be able to read the original. This, in its turn, implies that they are not specialists in his author. On the one hand, they probably know very little about him; on the other, their appetite for scholarly footnotes is probably small... The translator's most difficult problem is not what his author says but his tone of voice. How is a man who thought and wrote in German to think and write in English and yet remain a unique personality called Goethe? To offer a translation to the public is to claim that one does know how Goethe would have written had English been his native tongue, to claim, in fact, that one has mediumistic gifts, and, as we all know, mediums are often rather shady characters."

He continued:

"If the translator has really understood his author, he will be able to evoke in his own mind not only what the author has done, but also what he wanted and ought to have done."

W.H. Auden's treatise on translation is very interesting. I agree with his assertion that a translator ought to understand his author more deeply than what is conveyed by what has been written down. I also agree that it is vital to maintain the tone of the original voice. But I disagree strongly with the argument that a translation should be what the author would have written if the translated language were the author's native tongue. Instead, a good translation should be faithful to the idioms of the foreign language and the author's tone of voice, maintaining the structure of the sentences without rendering text unreadable. A tall order indeed. But it is achievable. The translator husband-and-wife team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky set glorious examples with their scrupulously faithful translations of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, et. al.

Lost in Translation

The memory of telling our English teacher in Ohio that that the only American musicians we, mostly-Chinese students, could easily call to mind were Michael Jackson and Madonna [Last blog entry: Remembering a Pop Icon], brought other memories to me.

In the early nineties, I was a university undergraduate in Northeastern China. When the Student Union announced a screening of video Gone With The Wind, the university administration got nervous and eventually ordered or persuaded the Student Union to switch to The Blue Lagoon for the disappointed students.

Pressed to explain why that happened, my guess is that Gone With The Wind, when introduced to Chinese audiences in the 30s or 40s, the Chinese title, 乱世佳人, could mean either The Beauty in Troubled Time, or The Beauty Who Made the World Upside Down. Rather risqué, wasn't it? It was further stigmatized during Cultural Revolution in the 60s, by being branded as "poisonous weed." Perhaps it was never officially banned, naturally, the "ban" was never officially lifted. Therefore, the students were treated with the lesser known, never banned for sure and apparently less dangerous The Blue Lagoon, in all its soft-pornographic glory. The occasion of that screening was International Women's Day, no less!

More on these ironic memories: I had the honor of viewing the video of The Killing Field (a movie about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge) in the same university (for English study), and read a Chinese translation of George Orwell's 1984, borrowed from the library in the same university. Apparently, the Chinese authorities were either too ignorant or too oblivious to see any connection between the Khmer Rouge or Big Brother and themselves.

Because of those experiences, I cheer for the occasional losses in translation.