Japanese – Translation Networks

Japanese

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.

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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 »

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.

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

Japanese American Experience in WWII

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Link to my HathiTrust collection: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis&c=758227452

Title Page of “Nisei in Uniform”
Title Page of “The evacuation and relocation of persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II”
These two book titles represent the focus of my HathiTrust collection. My collection looks at the Japanese American experience during WWII including (but not limited to) Japanese American incarceration and Japanese Americans in the U.S. military.

Introduction

As a Japanese American, I have always been interested in the experiences of Japanese Americans during World War II. That is why I decided to focus my collection on this topic. My collection looks at the treatment of Japanese Americans on the home front (mainly at Japanese Incarceration) and their service in the military. Before I started curating this collection, my knowledge on Japanese Americans service in the military was mainly on the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, since those were the units that my family members had fought in. Therefore the first text that really caught my eye was “Nisei Linguists: Japanese Americans in the Military Intelligence Service during WWII”. It was interesting to read about how essential Japanese Americans were during WWII in Military Intelligence units.

Connections

A Page from “Nisei in Uniform”

I chose this image from the “Nisei in Uniform” book for a couple of reasons. First, the top half of the page is an attention grabbing photo showing the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. The bottom half of the page features photos of three soldiers, all Americans, who volunteered for military service from incarceration camps. My translation network map connects some of my sources (such as this one) with the Library of Congress: Tagore on the lightning talks slide. The Library of Congress source shows the different ways that Rabindranath Tagore’s name is romanized and translated. I saw a connection since with Japanese American names such as the names of these men, the name must be romanized and there are multiple ways to romanize their names (with some variations being more common than others).

I think that Jacky’s collection on “Education in the 1900s in China” can be connected to my collection. There are multiple texts in my collection looking at the education system during World War II. For example, one of the texts in my collection is on Japanese language programs at the University of Michigan during the war, and another is on Army Japanese language schools. My collection also looks at the Japanese American experience in Internment Camps, which includes schools for the children that were incarcerated there. Jacky’s post mentions how people debated whether politics should be discussed about. This discussion about what should be included in the education curriculum is something that would have occurred in Japanese Internment Camps as well.

Sawyer Seminar

In the closing remarks of the Sawyer Seminar, my professor Christi Merrill said that human elements can change the way that we see the connection and histories between different texts. This is something that I experienced in class, since while looking for connections between my collection and my classmates’ collections, I had a difficult time finding a connection to Michael’s collection. However, since Michael is knowledgeable in Sufism (where I am not), Michael was able to find a connection between Sufism and Japanese Incarceration.

Category/Tags Name

I think that one category name that could connect my post with my classmates post is the category of “Historical Events”. Even if their collections are not truly focused on a historical event, there could be a certain event that affects their collection. For example, Kristen mentioned in her blog post that Japanese writing changed from traditionally being written right to left to be written left to right after World War II. Therefore, our collections could be connected in an even smaller category of “World War II”, but even more of our classmates collections could be included in the broader category of “Historical Events”

This screencast highlights a keyword of “Education” which can be connected both to Japanese Incarceration as well as the Military, and it shows three texts in my collection that can be connected to this keyword. As mentioned earlier, when connecting my collection to Jacky’s collection, there were schools in the Interment Camps for Incarcerated children as well as Japanese Language Schools for Military Intelligence at the University of Michigan. I also show how the catalog records of the three texts (The evacuation and relocation of persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II, The Army Japanese language school, and The Japanese language programs at the University of Michigan during World War II) are not tagged to be related to education at all. The second two texts do not have any tags, which can make it difficult for humans to make connections and impossible for bots to make connections between these texts

Important Links

Japanese American Experience in WWII 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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