MCLC: Mo Yan and jailed writers (2)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42 at cornell.edu>
Subject: Mo Yan and jailed writers (2)
***********************************************************

About Zheng, Ming Fang's posting below, and the minutiae of translating
Mo Yan, and about ambiguity vs. self-contradiction, and the dangers of
taking news outlet's translations at face value:

This is very interesting indeed and speaks to the role of "official"
translators dancing a fine line between translating accurately what the
subject said, and, toeing the Party line -- sometimes trying to toe it
ever more closely than the subject him/herself may have intended, or in
a different or hasty manner, so that the subject (when unable to follow
& dance along with the translation), comes crashing down with it.

If the translator here was the same Chinese woman translating into
English as when he gave his first Stockholm press conference, then I
would not be surprised, because it is exactly the same pattern of her
trying to toe the Party line too closely even before listening to what
her subject is finishing to say. Example: In the clip posted online,
when confronted with a question about censorship in China, he said "wo
fan-gan suoyou de jiancha ..." (I am disgusted with all censorship . .
.), which may have been intended as a clever way of deflecting the
question -- but which she promptly mistranslated as "I am against all
censorship ... " That translator was very shaky overall (don't know who
she is), but my guess would be that she is some officially-assigned
interpreter instructed or obliged not to translate accurately in the
spirit of a devoted translator, but to tell the foreigners what they
should want to hear, or perhaps, cleverly tell the foreigners something
that might deflect criticism. It did not work so well here -- even if
most Western media (including in my own country, Sweden), seemed to just
accept the translation and repeated it in print as a quote from him, as
if that was what he had said -- even though, Mo Yan then proceeded to
say too much and outdoing the translators' "smoothing" efforts, in his
inimitable way, by belittling censorship, in his now-infamous comparison
to airport security, and so on.

-- there were exceptions of course, as in the Guardian which they got
the main points:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/07/mo-yan-censorship-nobel?intcmp=
239
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/11/mo-yan-nobel-prize-censorship?I
NTCMP=SRCH

But a really clever journalist would have asked him: "State censorship
was just officially abolished in Burma last week... the last government
chief censor was just interviewed after he lost the job as his position
was abolished. Why not in China? When will you do this in China?"

I still remember from when I worked in China in the 1980s (as an
"official" translator actually), private Chinese citizens were fuming,
in private, about how upset they were with foreign journalists shown on
TV interviewing their own officials -- and acting soooo deferent, even
though right there they got the chance to ask the hard questions to the
face of the officials AND, as foreigners, would not lose their job or go
to jail for it.

A memory that stuck in my mind from an even earlier time, as a student
in Denmark in the early 1980s: A delegation of "writers" from the
official Chinese writers association visited the university of
Copenhagen where I was studying, and had a meeting with the university's
then cohort of scholars studying Chinese literature. The chit-chat was
agonizing, because they would only toe the party line, with icy smiles,
and simply shut down in the face of any "uncomfortable" question. I was
just an young undergraduate student, but I distinctly remember how
afterwards the local hosts (Danish academics) themselves fumed, after
their guests left, that "okey, we probably have to forgive them and put
up with that sort of show this one time, since China just barely began
to open up" and " . . . we probably still have to wait for real change"
-- I think that was in 1981 . . .

sincerely, Magnus Fiskesjö