chinese – Translation Networks

chinese

Jing Ping Mei and Chinese Character Transformation

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My HathiTrust Collection

Introduction

My HathiTrust collection focuses on two main aspects. One is about Jing Ping Mei as one of the classic Chinese works of literature, specifically attempting to uncover the book’s lasting popularity today while it was banned for over two centuries since its first publication. Another aspect of my collection would be focusing on the ways how Chinese characters are being transformed overtime and mainly because I found myself to be interested in the original text that was written in Jing Ping Mei and would like to investigate in what ways the Chinese characters during that period are similar or different to modern times.

Motivation

I have heard that some classic Chinese literature is something that all of us should be reading at least once throughout our lifetime, yet, I did not have much exposure to Chinese literature after coming to the United States at the age of 14. However, I have always been interested in one of the classic Chinese literature – Jing Ping Mei (金瓶梅), also known as The Plum in the Golden Vase or The Golden Lotus. What draws me to spend time digesting all the texts is one of the podcasts that I have been listening to – 吳淡如人生不能沒有的故事 (Necessary Stories throughout the Life). The host spent 21 episodes highlighting all the key parts throughout the plot, including an in-depth analysis of why all the characters are taking the actions that they are taking given that period, especially for women in China during the 1600s-1700s.

Jing Ping Mei 金瓶梅

The plot of the story is centered around Ximen Qing (西門慶), a corrupt social climber as well as a merchant at the same time along with his six wives. While many said the main reason why this book has been banned for over two centuries was due to the nudity as well as sexual scenes that are described throughout the story, some believed this book has shown too much about the corrupt social hierarchy as well as the government was the main reason why that this book was banned. One of the most influential authors Lu Xun commented on this book during the 1920s, “it is the most famous of the novels of manners in the Ming dynasty, both significantly and effectively showing the condemnation of the whole ruling class during the end of Ming dynasty”.

The Purpose of being a woman throughout China was to mainly breed children for husband, and take good care of her family as well as her parents for the rest of her life. These were the general consensus on how the public perceived women throughout China over the course of history for over thousands of years. Education resources were scarce throughout all dynasties in China, not to mention very few women have the ability to be educated in which most females in China were illiterate due to lack of education. Therefore, as long as females are able to find a husband that is willing to take care of them as well as providing needs to their life that everything should be good.

However, given the historical context of Jing Ping Mei that it was the end of Ming Dynasty, meaning there are lots of social problems that were taking place specifically on the corruption of the government. Most people are not able to live a decent life if they do not have any form of connections with the government, and Ximen Qing from Jing Ping Mei was a businessman/ merchant that works tightly with the government in which as long as there are some sort of “profitability” taking place that the government would be gladly opened leeways to Ximen Qing to grant all his requests.

Literature of Jing Ping Mei vs Contemporary Chinese Literature 

Text of Jing Ping Mei Download
Text from Lu Xun Download

The main reason why that Jing Ping Mei intrigued me besides the social problem it portrays is the way of language is being used. Over the course of time, both Chinese literature and character have transformed several times throughout almost three thousand years of Chinese history, from ancient times, before the century all the way to the present. Though Jing Ping Mei was written during the 1600s-1700s (the exact time period is unsure since the book has been revised a couple of times after being banned), its text and literature are surprisingly similar to modern times during the 1900s. Not only is the style of a character similar, but so is the language itself. The 1700s-1800s marked the critical period of how China is in the middle of a transformation from ancient periods to modern times, and its style of language has significantly shown that.

Transformation of Chinese Character 

Character from Qin Dynasty
Character from Qin Dynasty

As I worked my way to finalize this project, I noticed and became aware of similarities as well as differences over the course of Chinese language evolution. After sharing the project that I am working on for this class with my mom, I found she recently drew herself into Chinese Seal Carving. The characters that she carved were from the Qin Dynasty, which is 221-206 B.C. Furthermore, I have found that the translation of each ancient character would be translated into modern times. After a close reading of some pages, it is not hard to find the logistics behind the Chinese language’s transformation and evolution.

Connection to the Class and Peers 

Part of the reason why I’m shifting my focus is inspiration from my peers as well as the discussion groups that I was paired with the other day during a class. Randy and Zara’s pieces are the ones that I found most interesting and inspiring when reading their blog post. For Randy, I like the article about how he finds expression of interest through the card game set we have played in class. This gives me a much better direction on how I can make connections and linkage among things that do not seem to have much in common. While it was fun and interesting when I was playing the game in class, I was having some trouble finding the direct linkage on how it can possibly relate with us when it comes to making the HathiTrust collection. Yet, from Randy’s discussion post last week that showed all the logistics behind, especially through randomization, we are able to pair various sets of cards together while they all look different from each other at a glance. For Chimuanya, I really enjoy reading all the poems that she mentioned throughout her post as this is something that I do not have much exposure to, and I find it intriguing to see how those poems relate to other cultures as well as folklore. Chimuanya’s idea on folklore-inspired me to put a deeper focus on simply focusing on one Chinese literature rather than diverge all my focuses without depth on any of those. Then to use that piece of literature to extend all the focus to other pieces such as artwork.

From the group discussion, I was paired with peers that shared common interests as we are all doing topics that are related to Chinese or East Asian literature. Yet, we found amongst ourselves that we all have an interest in translation differences while using East Asian literature/ languages to compare trends and findings we observed from the HathiTrust collection. For example, Yao is interested in seeing the connections between Chinese and Japanese characters, and specifically focusing on how the Chinese character would be pronounced differently in Japanese as well as the logistics behind it. Both Jake and Yining are interested in doing the Chinese literature on how it transforms over the course of time. Hence, I decided to turn my focus to Jin Ping Mei and then extend it further with other works. Since this literature by itself has discussed various aspects of Chinese literature as well as culture, the social scene when China was at the transformation from *ancient to classic times.
*ancient time is before 1600s, classic time is 1600s-1800s, modern time is 1800s-present

Connection to Sawyer Seminar/ Lightning Talk 

Nevertheless, the lightning talk, as well as the posts from Sawyer Seminar, have inspired me since the beginning of the class. From Lightning Talk, I would say it gives me a whole new lens to look at things that I have never been exposed to before. The most memorable one was Two men riding on horses in the forest. It is one of the most interesting images I found from our first day of class. From Swarnim’s lightning talk, I have learned that this image does in fact have a strong correlation with colonial literature along with the Hebrew/ Jewish culture. The recitation is focusing on what ways we can utilize all of those contextualized cultural objects and their power relation to help us align our interest in a study or even simply throughout our everyday lives.

From the Sawyer talk, I personally gained something that I have never been exposed to before. For example, in what ways we can be making the connections among all these Asian cultures as well as literature altogether in one place. On top of that, I am most interested in the Multivalence of the Hebrew Alphabet Across Jewish Languages in the HathiTrust repository. Because to me both Hebrew and Jewish are the languages that I rarely have been exposed to throughout my life, and to me, the characteristics of these languages are especially hard to understand or even see the patterns among all of them. Yet, with the power of HathiTrust, they would be able to distinguish the dynamic differences among all the characters including how the grammar structure would work for those languages.

Collection Map: http://www.translationnetworks.com/collections/195

Jing Ping Mei and Chinese Character Transformation Read More »

Chinese Folklore

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My Hathitrust Collection

Living in China as a child offered me many experiences that most American children don’t get. I attended school there and learned about Chinese history and culture. One thing that was not widely discussed, however, was Chinese folklore and cultural stories. In fact, it wasn’t until moving back to the United States that I received any exposure to Chinese folklore at all. This collection was intended to expand knowledge about Chinese folklore and stories, and to provide me with insight into connections between traditional Chinese stories and stories from other countries.

This Hathitrust collection is a group of documents related to Chinese folklore and children’s stories. It incorporates Chinese history and culture while still remaining interesting to children, which adds an interesting element to the information presented. This collection was particularly interesting to me because I’m not fluent in Chinese, so it’s often difficult to read documents with words that I’m unfamiliar with. Children’s stories include easier words that I’m more likely to understand.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Screen-Shot-2022-04-26-at-5.19.46-PM.png
This poem includes references to the historical Chinese tradition of feet binding, and brings up interesting questions about the quality of life of the little girl. It’s unclear if her feet are small because she’s a child or because of feet binding. The original Chinese text might provide more insight into this question.

https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001277171

In the Sawyer Seminar, Marina Mayorski spoke about how computers have difficulty reading texts that are not in roman scripts. This particular piece has both English and Chinese translations throughout, so this might make it more difficult for computers to analyze a document. Heather Christensen made a point during her talk, which was that over 50% of the documents in Hathitrust are English, so it makes sense why documents in non-roman scripts are more difficult to read. Ben Bunnell also spoke about the 3D reconstruction software in place for scanning documents like these, which is particularly interesting to me, because I am interested in computer science.

This next document contains a story entitled The Journey of the Corpse. I found connections to this story through the Tales of Hindu Devilry document in the interactive map. The Tales of Hindu Devilry includes a story similar to this one. This story begins with a poem about friendship, and goes on to tell the story of a man who desperately wants to save the life of his friend.

https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001185356

Other students also examined folklore from other countries. Comparing and contrasting Chinese literature to the stories of other countries could provide a lot of insight into different cultures. Anuja’s post, “An Exploration of South Asian Folklore,” would offer many interesting comparisons to Chinese folklore.

My collection incorporates elements of poetry, storytelling, and folklore in Chinese literature. The documents come from a variety of different time periods, showcasing the changes in Chinese literature throughout history. By looking at my collection, one is able to gain a deeper understanding of Chinese culture and history while reading engaging stories.

Chinese Folklore Read More »

Translations and Interpretations of the Chinese Folk Story “Journey to the West” (西遊記)

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Link to my HathiTrust Collection: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis;c=437436280

Background:

1911 ink print in Japanese interpretation “Ehon Saiyūki” (https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002304742). Illustrates the transcultural interpretations of “Journey to the West” through the distinct Japanese style of the characters.

The “Journey to the West” is a 16th Century Chinese novel written by poet Wu Cheng’en which follows the journey of the Buddhist Monk Xuanzang who in the original retelling was tasked with bringing back sacred texts from the “West” (most likely Central Asia or India). Along his journey, he meets multiple anthropomorphic travelling companions. Among them the Monkey King “Sun Wukong” and the Pig Man “Zhu Bajie”. Each of the main characters in “Journey to the West” has their own extensive backstory and narrative history. Typically these separate stories like “Monkey King” are regarded as all falling under the collective umbrella of “Journey to the West”.

My Collection

The goal of my collection is to investigate the different retellings of the story through the dimensions of language and time. As a kid, we had an old VHS tape that we passed around with the neighbors that had a Chinese language cartoon of “Journey to the West”. Upon researching the original story, I was surprised how the version I remembered from my childhood differed significantly from the original retelling. This got me curious as to how the story evolved over time and the role language might have played in its evolution. As a result my collection contains versions of “Journey to the West” in Chinese, English, and Japanese with varying publication dates from the 16th century to the modern era.

Below is a page from the first volume of a printing of the original “Journey to the West”. Note the right to left column reading convention as well as the traditional writing of the characters. What is particularly interesting is the use of modern Chinese punctuation which was only introduced in 1920 in conjunction with traditional Chinese judou markings. This is anachronistic considering the publication date given by HathiTrust of 1696 where traditional Chinese punctuation would still have been used. This raises the question of how HathiTrust determines the publication date when collecting metadata for sources. In the Sawyer Seminar, it was mentioned by librarian Leigh Billings that OCR provides the basis for a lot of the meta data generated by HathiTrust. In this case there was no indication in the Full View of the source that a publication date was provided so it raises the question as to both what extraneous sources HathiTrust relies on for metadata as well as the credibility of such sources. Much like the upside down Persian work in the Lightning Talk, this source is also mis-catalogued in HathiTrust.

I was inspired to look deeper into the evolution of Chinese writing scripts by my classmate Yao Tan’s blog post about the lingual speciation of Japanese Kanji and Chinese. Connections like these don’t seem to be picked up by OCR very frequently so it seems to be a way for humans with domain specific knowledge to find valuable connections ignored by machine learning.

mdp-39015022786860-5-1649347701Download
Note the provided publication date

Analysis:

Translations and Interpretations of the Chinese Folk Story “Journey to the West” (西遊記) Read More »

Translating Chinese

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My collection is focused on the translation of Chinese nouns, such as names, cities, etc. The collection includes works across the times and topics to discover the evolution and different approaches of the translation method. Specifically, how did the writers and translators use the English alphabet to mimic Chinese pronunciation?

My HathiTrust Collection

As I clicked through the interactive map, I was intrigued by the Hindu devilry story, so I started searching for folklore and story in China. Searching non-Roman language in HathiTrust is a huge issue since when I search for keywords such as folklore or folktale, not many relating results came out. It was really helpful to learn from the librarians to search for the corresponding word in Chinese. So instead of folklore, I searched for “min zu gu shi”. Many works in Chinese do not have an English title, and they are titled with the pronunciation of the Chinese title. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924079725788&view=1up&seq=2&skin=2021Links to an external site. This is a collection of literature from the Yunnan minority in China and the title is “Yunnan shao shu min zu wen xue lun ji”. 

The Herd Boy and the Weaving Maiden

This is a Chinese folktale. It is included in one of the books in my collection. The other stories in the book helped me examine the difference in character names compared to the modern standard translation. Although this particular story did not serve that purpose, the story connects me to the tales of Hindu devilry in the hyperlinked lightning talks. Both of these are English translation of folktales from a different culture that suffers from cultural and pronunciation differences.

As mentioned by one of my classmate Conor McCarty Durkin, “a note or a message“ can fail to be “captured by algorithms and search engines in the same way a human might”. The loss of information is even true for human translation. I have read the story in both Chinese and English. Since folktales are closely related to the cultural background, the translator from another culture is hard to capture the underlying meaning or the “atmosphere” even when they understand every word.

The rambles of the Emperor Ching Tĭh in Këang Nan

The screencast displays a search of the subject of a book’s catalog record. The translation method in this book is very old. The tonal mark in the title “The rambles of the Emperor Ching Tĭh in Këang Nan” is no longer used in today’s translation. I believe Këang Nan is the equivalent of Jiang Nan in today’s Chinese typing system. However, I could not find the historical figure in Chinese history based on the name provides in the book. It is even more interesting yet frustrating that when I search the subject, this book is the only thing that appears in the result, and I begin to doubt if it is only a fictional character.

This makes the search for related content very difficult, and this is an issue that also happens for other languages, such as Hindi. The Key word here is “evolution”, which occurs in writing system as time passes. For the google book discussed in the Sawyer Seminar, the issue really is, how do you correlate these contents that are essentially the same thing only spelled differently?

The Chinese translation is talked about extensively in the Sawyer Seminar by Xiaoxi Zhang . The evolution of writing system not only effects translation, but more commonly, the literature itself. The words in the Chinese version of the crescent moon are formatted vertically, and that is a common occurrence during the republican time because the Chinese wrote from right to left and from top to bottom ever since the dynasty era. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.32000011091339&view=1up&seq=3&skin=2021Links to an external site. This is another example of older Chinese text. In fact, this special format was shared by a lot of Asia Countries because they were influenced by the Chinese culture. This is an example in Japanese https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015083054752&view=1up&seq=1&skin=2021 Links to an external site. and you can see the text in also written vertically. Perhaps evolution is also evident in a single language. In the post by Kimberly K Liang, her collection is about the progress of how Chinese literature have evolved from ancient to contemporary.

Category: evolution

Under this category, I am able to connect my work with posts of Kimberly K Liang and Michael J Briggs.

Translating Chinese Read More »

Education in 1900s in China

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I was always wanting to do some research related to education as I wanted to use my knowledge of technology to enhance education. This project gives me a really good opportunity to look at some old people’s opinions on education in China back in the 1900s. That period was a chaotic developing period as many changes were happening in China at that time. It is really interesting and also valuable to look at some ideas back then.

Below is a picture of a famous magazine back from that period called “Xin Qing Nian”. It introduced many western ideas such as democracy and freedom to China. Those newly appeared ideas caused a huge conflict between traditional customs and introduced theories. I put this cover here because I believed this could be considered as the key to education at that time. Many students learned from those magazines and went out to share their understandings. I believe it is still important now to help students get to know different ideas and share their understanding as well.

https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nnc1.cu05853974?urlappend=%3Bseq=5%3Bownerid=113725522-498

Link to my collection: Collections: asian297-jundesong | HathiTrust Digital Library

Link to the specific page: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nnc1.cu04784189?urlappend=%3Bseq=61%3Bownerid=113488790-65

My collection is basically about the education in the 1900s in China. Those texts illustrate what people thought at that time about education.

nnc1-cu04784189-61-63-1648751872Download

Catalog Record: Shi di xue bao = Journal of the Historical &… | HathiTrust Digital Library

This is a screenshot of the famous magazine “Xin Qing Nian” when I searched education in that period in China. I found it important and very related to my research as it imported many western ideas into China and greatly influenced the students at that time. The keyword here is “Periodicals”. It is hard to find archival, educational documents directly from that time; the general way to collect information is to read periodicals as those documents contain some essays related to education. These periodicals help us learn what they thought during the 1900s.

I think my research connected to the “Xin Yue Ji” on the slide as they were both written in Chinese. Furthermore, it is connected to “Lu Xun” on the Translation Network map. Lu Xun was a famous movement leader at the time, and his ideas influenced many students. Specifically, people began to use modern Chinese because of him, which was a big step in China’s education history.

I am surprised to find many common things in my classmates’ posts and my collections. For example, Kimberly K Liang focuses on the evolution of ancient Chinese literature to modern Chinese literature(Ancient to Contemporary Chinese Literature – Translation Networks (umich.edu)). I began to notice more on this topic as many of my collections are from the time when the transition is the most intense. I am intrigued by the idea of evolution from ancient Chinese literature to contemporary Chinese literature. I didn’t have much experience of this change before as I hadn’t engaged with ancient Chinese literature much. I started to get more ideas on these topics as I conducted my research. Even works from the 1910s, still relatively recent, are still a little bit hard for me to understand. Also, Yan Wei Jin(Chinese Folklore – Translation Networks (umich.edu)) and Anuja Bagri are both focusing on old stories but from different countries. Talking about the rules, simple rules can be the language used to write materials that bots can recognize. There are many examples of materials written in Chinese. Another rule is to find synonyms in the title. An example is Wei Jin’s stories about Mulan and Bagri’s old imaginative Indian tales. Finally, the rule requires more thought. My research on 1900s education might not seem related to the evolution of ancient Chinese to modern Chinese of Kimberly K Liang’s collections at first; however, it is actually at that time the transition became more and more intense. These kinds of links require more historical and cultural backgrounds. Also, my research is related to Yan Wei Jin and Anuja Bagri’s as we are all interested in the culture of a specific country. The culture of a country is very important to the education of a country as each country wants to pass its unique culture to the next generation. Therefore, we see a lot of old national literatures such as tales in each country’s education. I think the category that Kimberly and I have both in common is Chinese, which is a bit obvious but still needs to be publicly recognized. Also, I noticed jhceobe posted a post about criminal procedures in China and Japan. I believe there must be many periodicals on this topic. Hence, in this sense, we are connected as well. Talking about the tags, my tag would be “Chinese” “Periodicals” “Cultures” “LuXun” “Education” “movement”.

In a Sawyer Seminar panel, Barbara Alvarez talked about how romanization plays a really important role in the digitization of books. Because we couldn’t type out non-roman words until recently, many works have been transliterated using the Roman script. This is an important aspect we should keep in mind while we are conducting research. This connects to my research as Chinese is much different from a language with the Latin alphabet. Hence, it used to be that to make a record of a Chinese work, it first needed to be transliterated. This process sometimes could cause the loss of information in the original work and caused many difficulties in recording historical words. One example is that there are only a few documents about my topics. Luckily now we have enough technology to record almost any language. Below is a screenshot of the keyword searching of “education” in Chinese in one of the Periodicals.

The first 6 matching terms are from contents. As you can see, there are multiple essays about education especially geography and history education. People at that time proposed many interesting ideas (such as addressing the importance of thinking), which I think is even greater than the history education in China nowadays. Thanks to the help of technology, we can now easily localize those essays we like to refer. (During the Seminar, I learned the origin of the cooperation between universities and Google. Universities and Google both would like to digitalize the books for their own reasons and hence the cooperation began.)

In addition to all of that, I began to be more and more interested in reading those documents as I found an effective way to search for them. Also, I found reading materials from that time really fun since I got to know ideas from that period. When I was reading the material, I found a lot of essays discussing the things that happened at that time. Those discussions help society become better.

https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nnc1.cu05853974?urlappend=%3Bseq=10%3Bownerid=113725522-493

This page is one of the examples. It discusses whether people at that time should talk about politics. Those readings make me better understand and experience the cultures and societies at that time. I have a more thorough and complete view of that period. Hopefully, I can express my understandings of that period in the future through games.

Education in 1900s in China Read More »

Cataloguing of Works in Japanese and Japanese-Related Languages in HathiTrust

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When I was searching through HathiTrust for Japanese works, I came across works that have different writing formats and sometimes contain rare, indigenous languages but are all categorized simply as ‘Japanese’. In this post, I would like to bring attention to these subtleties and make connections to collections that some of my other classmates have created with similar ideas in order to aid the effort to create a Translation Network with rich connections that artificial intelligence cannot recognize.

The screencast below is showing a work in HathiTrust that is categorized as written in Japanese. It is true that it is mostly in Japanese, but the work is about the Ainu culture and language – a indigenous group in northern Japan – and contains words from their language, albeit in katakana and romanji since Ainu does not have a written system. I would not go as far as saying it is miscatalogued, but I believe having a more granular approach to cataloguing works will make the HathiTrust experience richer. My classmate, Teddy Sweeney, had a similar experience which he outlined in his post, where he found a work that was catalogued as French but was not written in French, and a work that was in Slovak but was catalogued as an ‘Undetermined’ language.

In the Sawyer Seminar that the University of Michigan Department of Comparative Literature held, speaker Xiaoxi Zhang, during the ‘lightning talks of engagements with HathiTrust sources’, mentioned the transition of horizontal text in China from being written right to left to left to right after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. This can be seen in the work The Crescent Moon linked in Ali Bolcakan’s Translation Network, where the horizontal title in Chinese is written right to left. In Japan as well, horizontal text was mostly written right to left until after WWII (after WWII, they were all written in left-to-right format). Some great examples found in HathiTrust are from newspapers, and the pdf and image below are pages from newspapers in HathiTrust. Both pages have horizontal titles that are read from right to left. When looking at their catalog records in HathiTrust, there is no mention of the writing format and for those who are unable to read Japanese, it would be impossible to recognize that one horizontal text in Japanese is written right-to-left and another left-to-right. My classmate Claire Russell brought up a similar concern in her post. Her collection is about Korean works with mixed writing systems – specifically works containing Hangul and Hanja. They are very different writing systems, yet they are not differentiated in the catalog record. She and I both believe that categorizing works by the specific writing systems/formats they use, even within the same language, would be highly valuable to HathiTrust users.

mdp-39015067855737-13-1649303959Download

Cataloguing of Works in Japanese and Japanese-Related Languages in HathiTrust Read More »

Hanzi? Kanji?

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My collection: http://: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis&c=1122358922

This collection is based on works written by Tao, Qian and Su, Shi. They were both very famous authors one thousand years ago and their works are wide spread in East Asia. The screenshots shows the Chinese version and the Japanese version of Su, Shi’s Qian Chibi Fu. Even though they look very similar, how they sound are very different. Take the first sentense for example, the Chinese version is pronounced as “Ren xu zhi qiu” while the Japanese version is “jin jyutsu no aki.” They sound completely different from each other. It is interesting to see how Chinese and Japanese have similar writing system but very different speaking system one thousand years ago.

As you can see in the screenshots below, this book has Chinese on one page and Japanese on another page and their writing systems share so many similarities. I am able to establish a connection to The Baitál pachísí in the lightning talk mindmap. It is very similar to the books written in multiple languages during the colonial era. In addition, the Xin yue ji (The crescent moon) also connects to the example below since both are collections of poems. Both are written in non-simplified Chinese in a vertical order from right to left. However, as you read the actual content of them, you can find that their use of grammar and choice of words are completely different while the hanzi characters they use are the same. Xin yue ji is more colloquial and informal and my example is more serious and hard to understand.  

Catalog: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/102432966

Click on the screenshot to see the Hathitrust page.

Chinese

Japanese (starting from the second right most column)

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3628003&view=1up&seq=58&skin=202

From Xiaoxi Zhang’s presentation on a Chinese translation of Bengali prose poems via English, I learnt that Chinese has two different sets of characters and writing systems. To me, it is mind-blowing to see that written Chinese is completely different from today, and I am unable to read if I time traveled to China 100 years ago. Also, Zhang’s presentation is one of my major reasons to research deep into ancient Chinese literature in Asian297. During my research, I found a fun fact that at that time, translated books about math, science, and engineering were written from left to right horizontally at that time, since the translators found it annoying and hard to read if they tried to squeeze all the math formulas in the Chinese texts written horizontally.

In Kimberly’s blog, I really like how she compared two versions of Jing Ping Mei published in different times to show how the way of language is being used and the examples of the transformation of Chinese characters. Even though both literature and characters evolved a lot during centuries, from her example, I learned the change in the language itself. And the later part is a perfect example of how Chinese change in its form of writing, making connection to my discussion about the ancient writing system in China and Japan, as well as my connection to Xin Yue Ji.

Jing Ping Mei and Chinese Character Transformation

Highlighting translation

I managed to get access to the no-full-view book via the interlibrary loan, which is super cool. The book is a Chinese-English translation of the poems and the author made connection between Tao, Qian, the poet, and a British poet, David Watson since Tao, Qian work satifies Watson’s theory of poetry. This is a connection that can never be found by robots.

Category: translation

Under this category, I am able to connect my work with abschmit, tsween, huang, zhang and yan’s discussion on their collections

Link to network: http://www.translationnetworks.com/networks/341

Hanzi? Kanji? Read More »

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