Poet Isabella Wang made some controversial comments about the Mandarin words she puts in her work (and the lack of translative footnotes):
There was a thread attached, but due to the backlash she got (chill out, people) she locked her account up. There was some “Ugh WHITE MEN!” signaling there, but the extent to which all words ought to be understood by the audience (in this case, reader) is an interesting one.
Whether foreign words need footnotes is ultimately a product of whether you want the meaning of the word expressly and accurately understood. It may seem like the answer to that is “yes” but it depends. Sometimes it doesn’t matter. Sometimes you actively don’t want the words understood. The opacity is the point.
You see this pertaining to issues apart from the actual language being used altogether. But let’s start with language.
In anime (and I believe other foreign-language translations), you often see divergences in translation between the subtitled and dubbed versions. The most common difference is that the dubbed version tends to be much more entry-level when it comes to language whereas the subtitled version relies much more assumptions that the viewer understands at least some of Japanese culture and indeed its language. But also, if they don’t, that’s okay. They figure you will pick it up from context clues. And usually you can. If a exasperated character angry with other people in the scene is going around saying “BAKA! BAKA!” you can tell it’s just an expression of frustration. The proximity of the translations “fool” or “idiot” are unnecessary. But for the dubbed, they want it understood and so will translate it.
When I was listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks, I switched back and forth between the British version and the American version. While I never listened to the same one of each, you could pick up on the differences pretty quickly. They “translated” the American version from English to other English. They made a decision that they wanted to avoid the confusion of unfamiliar words even if they were pretty discernible from context clues. Personally, I preferred the British version partly because I thought the actor was better but also because having them actually say “git” instead of “jerk” gave a better feeling of the story’s setting and it was still familiar enough that it didn’t cause any confusion.
Neither decision is correct, but it’s something you consider the audience for.
I am not familiar with Wang’s writing, but if it comes from a place of authentic Chinese or Chinese-American experience, it does make sense to use the Mandarin words and including footnotes could easily be a distraction to the flow. If an author would rather take a chance that the audience doesn’t understand the word and won’t pick it up in context, that’s a pretty reasonable artistic decision. If people are angry about that they need to chill out. If she is angry that they are missing something because they don’t understand the words and refuse to look it up, she needs to chill out because she is the one that chose to put an unfamiliar word out there and expect the reader to do the work. The more work you assign, the more you have to figure that people won’t do it unless you have a particular dedicated (but in which case probably small) audience. In which case, do you your thing.
Outside of language choice, you often see unfamiliar words deployed precisely because the unfamiliarity says something. For example, you might have a character throwing out a bunch of nonsense jargon and the jargon itself is the point. For example, if you’re on a spaceship and someone says that the bad guys hit their “Central Oscillator”… what is that? doesn’t matter. But it’s central. Given the urgency of the character, important. The fact that they don’t say “carburetor” communicates that you’re dealing with advanced or novel technology. The opacity is the communication.
Likewise, if you have a character that is using long and difficult to understand words, you are communicating something about that character precisely by putting words out there that the reader (or viewer) may not understand. Perhaps the wording conveys a character’s superior intelligence, excellent language skill, or just that they are obnoxious and pretentious. Writers are often told “show don’t tell” and that is a form of showing.
In most of these cases, having a footnote would largely defeat the purpose. Worse, it would undermine it because by presenting the precise definition of the word you are suggesting that precision is necessary when in fact the word is meant to be foreign, represent a vibe, or show us something about the character. The precise definition is actually a distraction from the communication at hand.
In the now-inaccessible thread, Wang talks a bit about how deliberate she is in her deployment of Mandarin, which suggest to some degree that her decision to do so where she does it is itself meant to communicate something. Perhaps a footnote would help, or perhaps it would hurt. It is the author’s call to make that decision, and the reader’s job to decide how they feel about it.
Isabella, not Elizabeth.
She comes off as kind of a piece of lèsè here.Report
Fun fact about “lèsè”: I first heard this word in an episode of Firefly twenty years ago, and for some reason it stuck in my head until I encountered it years later studying Mandarin. Taiwanese Mandarin (not to be confused with Taiwanese Hokkien, the primary language spoken in Taiwan prior to the KMT takeover, often referred to as just “Taiwanese,” and not mutually intelligible with Mandarin) is about as similar to standard Mandarin as American English is to British English. A given word will generally be pronounced the same way in Taiwan and China. Occasionally there will be a slight difference like a change in the tone contour.
One of the few words that’s completely different is 垃圾, which is read as lājī in China and lèsè in Taiwan. So apparently people in the world of Firefly speak Taiwanese Mandarin specifically. I don’t know whether this was intended to suggest anything interesting about the course of history leading up to the events of the show. Maybe it was just that their language consultant was from Taiwan.Report
I was going to mention Firefly, which often had the characters swearing and cursing in (IIRC) Mandarin so as to avoid Fox censors.
No translation was ever provided.Report
The Expanse never explains Belter.
Heck, there’s lots and lots of movies that deal with foreign language that don’t provide subtitles for certain parts of the dialogue, or (like The Hunt For Red October) use a mix of no subtitles, subtitles, and switch-to-English for the sake of the viewer explicitly to add different context to the relevant scene(s).Report
I loved the Belter patois.
Interestingly in Hunt for Red October I don’t think they’re actually speaking Russian (or so a Russian speaker once told me), just making semi-Russian sounding noise. This is something I’ve noticed in John McTiernan directed movies. The same thing happens in Die Hard and Die Hard with a Vengeance, where the terrorists don’t actually speak German.
A similar sequence occurs in the 13th Warrior but I am not sure if the Vikings are actually speaking some nordic language before it turns to English.Report
Yeah it was a fun series and set of books but never made any darn sense in terms of economics or history. If you are lofting people a bajillion miles into space to work then treating them humanely is merely economic good sense. Also does water combust inside life forms or something in the Expanse world because there’s no universe where mining water out of the belt for Earth would be more economical than simply desalinating it or otherwise recycling it on Earth.
But it made for a great story set anyhow.Report
I never read the books but on the show I always figured the poor treatment was something that evolved over time as populations grew on the various outposts. Like I would figure the highly specialized people in initial expeditions and settlement would be treated well but not necessarily those being born there after a couple generations. Admittedly I didn’t think that hard about it though.Report
Sure, but even still the whole core of the “poor treatment” mantra of the Expanse was predominantly food/oxygen/space deprivation. In space with energy virtually unlimited and water available by the endless tons the idea of water (mined from space) or air (made by cracking limitless water with limitless energy) being scarce is ludicrous.Report
Nitrogen, carbon, and all the trace elements leak out of a space station all the time (unless the spaceships that carry such away have really good recycling and bring every bit of poop and piss back). My impression from the books is that — like most science fiction that has inners and outers — such things in quantities to support millions of people come with painful strings attached.Report
Water itself doesn’t combust, but in a habitat in space, it can be lost anytime someone opens the airlock, or via hull breach. Or it’s being shipped to new habitats.
Or it’s being used as fuel.Report
Sure, but in this fictional context the water is being shipped, across space, to Earth and Mars. So much water, for instance, that they had denuded Europa of its hydrosphere and were starting in on ring based water sources.
Now I grant some space ships and habitats crack water and burn it as fuel and blast it out as propellant (though their main drives are some form of nuclear) but the idea that they drained Europa and that it’s more economical to move Europas water to Earth rather than just desalinate the oceans requires some serious explanation the author doesn’t provide. Nor do they need to, mind, it’s a book about sci-fi politics and sci-fi technology, not sci-fi economics.Report
Another good example.
Personally, it doesn’t bother me, I can usually grok the meaning from context, so the specific translation isn’t important, although it may be interesting.Report
Sure they do. They explain that a belter does not know fear. A Belter knows only sharpness.Report
“If an author would rather take a chance that the audience doesn’t understand the word and won’t pick it up in context, that’s a pretty reasonable artistic decision. If people are angry about that they need to chill out. If she is angry that they are missing something because they don’t understand the words and refuse to look it up, she needs to chill out because she is the one that chose to put an unfamiliar word out there and expect the reader to do the work.“
This is the correct answer to the vast majority of social media kerfuffles. I’m sure she did have some assholes that gave her some racist “this is America we talk English here” bullshit, because surprise surprise it’s a big country and there are assholes. But rather than do the reasonable thing and block the assholes or mute them, she went the “you entitled white people” route and ratcheted up the conflict.
And I’m sure it can be hard to not respond in kind to bad faith trolls, that the constant bombardment is taxing. But that’s just another reason why social media is a scourge on society. It gives our worst an outlet to have outsized influence, whether it’s the racists in one end of the spectrum or the racists on the other. Like the good book says, surround yourself with fools, and you’re going to become a fool. Well, there’s a lot of fools on social media.Report
Who do you think her audience is? I’m sure its not some stock ugly American trope, but includes readers interested in multicultural topics that would like to know/understand more.
Her later comment indicates she’s not interested in either: “The second anyone implies that white people might not be the target audience for something, it causes reader/writer meltdowns across Twitter.” It sounds like her intended audience is the Chinese diaspora in Vancouver.Report
Do you think the Internet would bat an eye if Irvine Welsh told people to f off for his use of Scottish slang in books and how it was hard to understand that in the midwest? Her post was a bit truculent but other people could be just as defiant without the harassment because they are white dudes.Report
Well, let’s see!
Readers, especially Jewish readers, are *not* entitled to footnotes / explanations / direct translations of non-English words that a Scottish author chooses to use in his books with intentions of not translating.Report
Don’t hock me a chynik.Report
Surely the key trigger for the controversy is the “especially white readers” bit.Report
It’s definitely true that without that she would have gotten a lot less notice, but a lot of the conversation that came did actually involve whether authors want to be understood. (Or maybe that’s what I gravitated towards.)Report
I was also under the impression that BIPOC was originally intended to be distinct from, say, AAPI people.
Like “Minorities, but not Asians or Jewish people”.Report
It doesn’t really matter. There’s no logical consistency or principle involved. It’s just how people communicate their status as a pretentious a-hole for the approval of other pretentious a-holes.Report
She appears to be Canadian, there are no significant black people in her racial typology.Report
I’ve seen pictures of her PM…Report
Yeah, I thought that was interesting. BIPOC seemed designed quite specifically to exclude AAPI from the “minority” subset.Report
As far as I can tell, the Asian-American and Asian-Canadian community seem pretty split on whether they consider themselves BIPOC or not. My wife does not like the term POC but she has Asian colleagues that use it. Though my wife was also born and raised in Singapore and does not consider herself a minority.Report
Officially, insofar as there can be an official definition, BIPOC stands for “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.” In practice, many people use it to mean “Black and Indigenous People of Color.” So it’s not, in all cases, meant to exclude high-achieving minorities completely, but it’s definitely intended to deemphasize them due to their incompatibility with the narrative.Report
I’m of two minds here. I grew up in a family where everyone was multilingual, words in different languages were all around, and sometimes we switched languages to exchange private comments in a public setting. In that respect, I’m used to pick up the meaning of new words by context, and a footnote would break the rhythm of the reading. So, no footnotes.
As long as the untranslated word is there to help set the mood, create the atmosphere, or add to the description. It cannot be a key element of the plot. I can read a story where a character having tarturok for breakfast brings memories of long gone summer vacations, without knowing what tarturok is. It would be very different than a story where the main character has to tarturok to save his wife. Then yes, I need to know exactly what is tarturok.
If I were to write a novel where using many untranslated foreign words was an important part of the artistic decision, I think a glossary at the end would be a helpful compromise.it would bridge the cultural divide, which, I would expect, is what the author wanted to do here. Show the reader what her culture feels in the inside.Report
I’ve never heard of her before. She seems young. Some examples of her poetry in the post would have been nice. My google abilities are failing me here. People are intimidated by poetry* in general and cultural contexts of foreign language are tough. Does she use Chinese characters or does she transliterate the characters into English?
I can see both sides of the argument here on providing a translation or not but the way the argument seems to have unfolded seems to be a perfect tempest in a teapot argument. You have a young, presumably very online poet who defended her stance in a provocative way and then got the predicable blowback but also too harshly from very online young reactionaries and white nationalists.
There is probably a way she could have defended her view without this being an internet tempest.
*People are so intimidated by poetry that my view is that when someone calls themselves a spoken word artist it is a signal that they know the word poetry intimidates people.Report
You can read a couple of her poems here.
“On Forgetting a Language” is pretty good, I guess. I like the finish:
It does a good job of evoking what it must be like.
But it’s easy to go from “so that’s how she feels” to “so that’s why she said that”.Report
She used the term nian gao. Do people not know what Google is?Report
Or context, for that matter.
“I overindulged on on the spring rolls and nian gao”
Even *I* knew that nian gao was a foodstuff. Even though (googles) yeah, even though I’ve never eaten that particular one.Report
I suppose it could also be music given the “wafting out of their windows” line, but the important thing is the whole “I am feeling homesick from the drip drops of my old culture that these others are drinking gulps from”.
It doesn’t matter if it is food or music. It’s homesick.Report
I have no idea what the context for the tweet was. What’s she responding to here? Maybe it was like two complaints in Amazon or Goodreads reviews.Report
Ezra Pound said of Eliot’s The Wasteland: “It was simple enough except for the four Sanskrit words at the end, and the meaning of three of those were clear eenough from the context”
Whereas I had to have my English prof tell me what the Sanskrit words meant. There are no footnotes on The Wasteland.Report
I find it amazing that so many very online people do not recognize “this will end poorly” tweets when composing them. The reaction against her was unjustified and her poetic choice is defensible but she phrased her defense in such a way that it seemed design to provoke a strong and defensive reaction.Report
There is a bit of joke on Twitter about never wanting to the main character of the day on Twitter. Cause if you’re the main character it’s for doing something ginormously stupid. Usually it’s just like this. Saying something either really dumb or taking a possibly good point then burying it under a couple tons of guano. There is always someone out there being loud and dumb. It’s Twiitertown Jake. The only really bad part of it is when people try to make something meaningful out of what is usually just dumb stuff.Report
There is also the issue of tone-policing. As Zane pointed out above, the main catalyst for backlash was adding “especially white readers” and the term BIPOC also seems extra-efficient in pissing people off here.Report
It started an entire subthread (on the original tweet itself) where BIPOC people explained to her that AAPI people were not BIPOC and she was explaining to them that they were.
If I were to guess why she locked her account, it would be because of that argument.
The whole “main character” thing among the thin-skinned cis-het non-BIPOCs? Who gives a crap? Them making a dogpile just demonstrates how right she was in the first place.
But she became a main character among the people with whom she was most wanting to crab bucket.
Nothing to do in that case but lock your account until it blows over.Report
So many letters!Report
That truly is the danger of Twitter. It allows people to toss off any random thought without considering whether that thought really needs to be expressed. Those 3 words bought her a world of hurt and now that’s all anyone is going to remember about her.
That said, I love it when authors toss in a foreign word or two. It’s a nice learning experience, at least for me.Report
Maybe it was. How many people who otherwise never would have heard of her are reading her poems today?Report
37?Report
I am not on twitter myself but have heard a lot of my social circle discussing the dynamic of it and the rub of the matter seems to be that to explode out of one’s little curated circle of twitter one has to both say something that the masses will latch onto AND have the (mis)fortune of the twitter stars aligning in terms of active controversies, attention, twitter influencers picking it up and so on. Which means one can be happily signalling away in ones own curated circle with curated circle approved language and ticks and then, BOOM, one tweet is suddenly swept up into the gyre.
I suspect it’d be like walking out the sidewalk from one’s house for years and then one day like any other day one of the sidewalk pavers randomly opens up into a spike filled pit.Report
The problem with online politics is that it encourages some very performative behavior that comes across poorly. Like I’m sure arguments like this happened before but they were behind closed doors and with like minded people. Twitter and other social media seems to encourage releasing this to the world.Report